Subject: Re: [lojban] A set of questions

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 15:00:45 -0400

At 03:22 PM 04/10/2001 -0500, Avital Oliver wrote:
>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?

I'm not sure I understand what you would use such a word for. In language 
we are primarily communicating about what actually occurs, a period that 
starts with co'a and ends with co'u. mo'u is primarily relevent for 
talking about how the actual "doing" of the event relates to when it would 
naturally end; so co'u after mo'u has a time period between them wherein 
the bridi holds; za'o as a tense describes a time when the bridi holds 
wherein it might not be expected to hold. If co'u is before mo'u, then the 
time between them is a time when the bridi does NOT hold, so you would 
never use the tense on a bridi. When co'u is before mo'u the pause word 
de'a can express the fact that the activity stopped too soon, but the time 
period after that is simply "ba" or "ba'o".

More interesting (no idea whether it has been discussed) would be the 
corresponding front end "natural starting point", in which case we could 
talk about that period in which the bridi holds "too soon" with a mirror 
tense of za'o. But we have neither of these because pc did not tell be 
that such tenses were found in some natural language, whereas the 
superfective za'o is found (you'll have to ask pc which language(s) though).

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

po and po'e are not specific for restrictive vs incidental. It is mere 
coincidence that they start with p rather than n (based on "ponse"). Jorge 
says he never uses them; they exist in the language because they reflect a 
natural language construct (the possessive) that may or may not be distinct 
from restrictive or incidental phrases, and because they were in TLI 
Loglan. (That the book appears to associate them with poi and disavows 
the link between po and ponse reflect the historical evolution of the 
language towards analyticity; I think those equivalences are not 
necessarily absolute.

>3) Why are there no non-veridical counterparts for almost any restrictive
>clause?
>
>4) Why are there no non-veridical incidental clauses?

Not sure what you mean by these. veridicality is a property of sumti 
descriptions.

>5) How are stage 4 fu'ivla really created?

So far, almost no one has done so. There is no easy way, which is why 
almost no one has done so.

>Are they used?

No. It is almost impossible to detect such usage in systematic processing 
of text because the words could be of so many possible forms.

>What happened with the CCVVCV proposition for cultures, as stated in the book?

The proposal exists. No one has used it to my knowledge.

In general fu'ivla are 2nd rate members of the lexicon, and people use them 
only when they have to. There have been so few usages of any of the Type 3 
fu'ivla, with the possible exception of the one for Esperanto, that there 
has been little justification to formally approve any Type 4 fu'ivla.

>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?

Jorge has answered the first. PA+mei has been used in sumti as well as in 
tanru, but not often.

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

Jorge has given an answer, but I'm not sure I understand the question. If 
I do, then I am not sure that they NEED to be defined other than the 
arbitrary desire for analyticity I mentioned above.

>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?

If you can use it, then it is needed in the language. It is optionally 
elided, where it is clear what place it fills (as Jorge said, usually the 
first empty slot).

>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?

I'm not sure vu'o has ever been used, and would have to look up to see what 
it means.

>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>'.

Jorge answered this.

>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.

That's what we do in natural languages, which apparently have never found a 
need for a short or pretty form. Jorge has suggested one way, another 
would be bajoiPAre'u or something like that

>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?

Lojban was designed before the WWW %^)

If you mean websites with Lojban words in their title, one would normally 
expect the preferred (shortest/highest scoring) form to be used if one 
wants to be found using a search engine.

Since there is not yet an official dictionary, it is hard to say whether it 
will affect the potential for the language.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org