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Re: [engelang] Xorban experimental tense markers



The following may sound harsh, but it's not meant to be.

I'm not sure it's a good idea to have tense markers at all in Xorban. Big parts of Xorban are already heading towards in the direction of Lojban, which some here like to call a failed attempt at a loglang, but now you're doing the same thing. I'm not seeing any advantages that Xorban has over Lojban, nor any clear differences if you keep doing this. You either have to admit that Lojban isn't as messed up as you say, or that you are unable to create something better yourself. How is Xorban any better than Lojban? I'm not at all opposed to Xorban, but I see fewer and fewer differences between it and Lojban as the development of Xorban progresses.

If you import tense markers, maybe they'll end up being prepositions like in Lojban, and soon you'll have all of BAI and FAhA as well. I personally don't think Lojban is half bad, but some of you clearly do, so I don't understand why you would allow these things into Xorban.

I thought Xorban was supposed to be simple grammatically, and "logical" whatever that means. If it is indeed supposed to remain simple, then you don't even need any new mechanisms for tense, you already have ju. If you accept my sentence variable u'a, then any tense can be expressed using the appropriate predicate and a ju-clause. Where such a predicate is missing, a new one should be created.

For example:
"I will go to the store." Is the same as "My going to the store is in the future [of now]."

Using ju + u'a, we get:

le zrce ju lo cbno blvu'ako klma'ake

You could also add more variables that refer to the moment of speaking the sentence as well the location of the same (cf dei in Lojban), to get shorter sentences, and alternatively just use shorter roots, e.g. cb for cbn, bv for blv etc. If, say, e'i was the variable referring to lo jai ca cusku be dei, it would get much shorter.

le zrce ju bvu'ake'i klma'ake

And I think context would let us elide that e'i most of the time anyway so that:

le zrce ju bvu'a klma'ake
To the market, in the future, I will go.

Which is reasonably short and adds nothing new to the language.

I'm sorry if I overlooked something or oversimplified the problems at hand. I'm just confused about some decisions.

mu'o mi'e la selpa'i

--
pilno zo le xu .i lo dei bangu cu se cmene zo lojbo .e nai zo lejbo

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gi'e sìrji se tàrmi
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