Subject: A set of questions

From: Avital Oliver <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 15:22:09 -0500 (CDT)

After I (finally) got ahold of a copy of the Reference Grammer, and read
it quite deeply, I have a few questions:

1) The book states that the tense modifier co'u states the actual endpoint
of an event, and mo'u states the natural endpoint, which may be before or
after co'u. Even still, za'o means "the time after mo'u, but before co'u",
and there is no modifier for "the time after co'u, but before mo'u". Did I
understand correctly, and if so, help?

2) Why are there no incidental clause counterparts for po and po'e, as
there
are for pe and po'u?

3) Why are there no non-veridical counterparts for almost any restrictive
clause?

4) Why are there no non-veridical incidental clauses?

5) How are stage 4 fu'ivla really created? Are they used? What happened
with the CCVVCV proposition for cultures, as stated in the book?

6) What is the difference between le ramei prenu, le prenu ramei and le re
prenu? Is PA+mei really used other than as the single brivla in a selbri?

7) Can/How can pe, po, po'u be 'defined' using only poi? (Would <po> be
<poi ke'a penso>?)

8) Why is ke'a needed? Why not always state that after a NOI clause, the
x1 of the clause bridi is ke'a, and if needed for any other places, you
can use ke'a?

9) vu'o connects the entire previous (group of) sumti. How can you connect
only 'part' of it, such as the last two out of three?

10) Is there any way to generate 'generic parenthesis', which could be
used whenever one doesn't remember exactly how to group that type, or so
forth? Some type of way to group tanru, and logical connectives, and
non-logical connectives, and mekso, and...?

11) Is there any method to do something like intersectino of two
tenses? How would I translate "Was he here today?"? As I see it, that
would mean intersecting the time of 'pu' with the time of 'ca <however you
say current day>'.

12) Why is there no generic way to say "during the next occurence of X"? I
think using ca le bavlamdei is quite ugly, especially when you want to do
some more complex things, like next week, next week+3 days, in 2 days, 4
days ago, ...? I'd expect there to be a cmavo stating "N occurences of X
from now" or something.

13) The fact that there are different ways of saying a lujvo with the same
meaning (selbri, selbridi, ...) would probably make it very hard to search
for lojban websites (if any really exist out of the known community), How
would I know what to search for? Using an 'official dictionry' kind of
loses the potential of Lojban, doesn't it?

14) What's the difference between do'e and pe?

Thank you all in adgvance,
Avital Oliver.