Subject: Re: Looking down

From: "A.W.T." <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 12:01:01 -0000

--- In lojban@y..., Nick Nicholas <nicholas@u...> wrote:
> Your assembled wit & wisdom is requested again, listmembers. Arnt
has
> pointed out to me that {mo'ini'u catlu le kabri} is not a good
rendering of
> "looked down at her cup", since it is not clear what exactly is
'moving
> downwards'. I think the eyeballs can be sensibly inferred as moving
down,
> and that when you don't have an overt predicate of motion involved,
you
> should be able to exert common sense (implicature) in determining
what it
> is that moves. But then again, is this simply a sense of
directionality, so
> that {ni'u catlu le kabri} is enough?
> 
> So which is it? Is {[mo'i]ni'u catlu le kabri} acceptable Lojban?
And more
> importantly, is it acceptable in the Lessons?

ni'a FAhA2 below location tense relation/direction;
downwards/down from ...

I'd say that {ni'a catlu le kabri} is sufficient to express the
relation/direction where the event of {catlu le kabri} is taking
place. It 
also worked expressing {catlu le ni'a kabri}
Maybe a phrase like "He looked at her from head to toes..." (i.e. his
gaze was wandering from...) needed a {mo'i}.

I feel, "physically correct" constructions like e.g. {mi vuto'o
catlu le ni'a zdani} were anything else than intuitive.

I also used {mo'i} in one of my translations from Chinese:
1) mo'ire'o le flejau... ku do jarco...
2) .i pa mo'izo'a ke ctopau mudre'e cu...
and I think that the idea of the different movements and the
specific "picture" respective should be quite obvious.

mu'omi'e .aulun.