Subject: Times of Day

From: Nick NICHOLAS <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 17:19:04 -0700 (PDT)

.i kantu be le se spuda be lenu la lojbab. cu cpedu loi pinka be le velcli
cu caca'a barda .i ja'ebo mi carmi se pluka le ka le lojbo cecmu cu
simsidju djica

Pierre has pointed out to me that, with numerals following te'i by
default, there is no real need for cmene for hours of the day. The only
compelling reason I can see is to distinguish by a cmene postfix (lir.,
lec.) between AM and PM. So:

(a) Should cmene for hours be mentioned? Or should we just make Lojban
24-hour and be done with it?

(b) Are the kinds of cmene currently documented in the lessons acceptable?
(I'm already going to have to fix the current suffix -cac, since it is not
the rafsi for cacra)

I have dim ancestral memories that the currently documented scheme is what
was in the lessons of yore, but

As an utter aside, btw, "dog-cat" is a venerable name for cheetahs,
precisely because of the claws (I think there's something about bone
structure in there as well); the genus name in the 19th century was in
fact Cynaelurus, which is Greek for "dog-cat". (I've just written a paper
on Byzantine notions of cheetahs, so you'll pardon my misspent erudition.)
However, the notion has been abandoned (the genus is now Acionyx
"pointy-nailed"), and wouldn't be readily available to the casual user; so
I don't think it's a good idea to call it that in Lojban. I'd much rather
use the fact that cheetahs are tameable and used in hunting --- jersi tirxu
(but that doesn't make it clear it hunts for humans, rather than on its
own.)

Word to whoever mentioned the chaos of feline taxonomy, btw. What a mess!

-- 
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| --- Roy Andrew Miller, _The Japanese Language_, p. 251 \
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\[email-masked]|||||||Transient Passenger||||||Nick Nicholas||||||||||
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