Subject: Re: Looking down

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 04:57:20 -0700

Re the "looking down" business. I do want to illustrate direction cmavo in
the lesson exercise, so I don't want to use a tanru. Besides, we have to
work out whether either mi {ni'a catlu} or {mi mo'i ni'a catlu} actually
mean anything, and if so, what. So:

I agree with John that speaking of motion is misleading; and to speak of
the light moving, as Pierre suggests, contradicts the essential egocentrism
of human language (I will speak of what I do with my eyes, not what photons
do!) And correctly points out that what is spoken of in English as moving
down is a gaze, not an eyeball; but I shudder to think what the Lojban for
"gaze" is, so that won't help either.

So without mo'i, does ni'a as a spatial tense indicate the location or the
directionality of the selbri? Aulun suggests the latter, so that "looking"
has a directionality expressed by {ni'a} ("looking" points like an arrow
points, which would be what is meant by "gaze".) But Pierre finds the
former is the case, and the Book makes it explicit {ni'a} expresses the
'imaginary journey' taken to where the bridi event takes place, so the
event {ni'a catlu} is "looks, below me", not "looks downwards".

All well and good. But Jorge countersuggests {fa'a ni'a}. Will *that* work?
The Book only says {fa'a} is not ego-centric --- that it involves direction
towards some point other than the speaker. But does that mean it expresses
the directedness of an event, or is it still describing the imaginary event
from that "point other than the speaker" to the bridi event?

Concretely, what do the following mean?

do fa'a bacru:
You speak towards something
You speak, while situated towards something else
Meaningless (the "some other point" is unspecified")

do fa'a ni'a bacru:
You speak downwards
You speak, while situated below something else (not the speaker)
You speak, while situated somewhere towards below me

If Jorge is right --- which I'd like for him to be, because that completes
a void in Lojban --- it does nonetheless mean that {fa'a} and {to'o} are
rather different to the other FAhA cmavo in meaning, because they do *not*
describe an imaginary journey. Presumably the same is not true for {zo'i}
and {ze'o}. If this is the case, it isn't made clear in the Book, and
should be made clear somewhere. (Can't be the lessons, I'm afraid ---
though perhaps I could insert a comment accompanying the exercise {fa'a
ni'a catlu} would occur in...

Nick Nicholas, TLG, UCI, USA. [email-masked] www.opoudjis.net
"Most Byzantine historians felt they knew enough to use the optatives
correctly; some of them were right." --- Harry Turtledove.