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On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 10:50 AM, selpa'i <seladwa@hidden.email> wrote: > > 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. I agree that tense doesn't merit any additional grammatical complexity, but the particles proposed by Mike would just be additional members to the already existing selma'o NA, no new mechanisms. > If > you accept my sentence variable u'a, Is "u'a" the situation described by the current utterance? >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 If we find that "ju lo cbno blvu'ako", which has the same grammar as a unary operator, is something that we might want to say often, we could assign that meaning to a unary operator. But doesn't that also say that my going to the store in the future of now is in the future of now, and that that is in the future of now, and that also is in the future of now, and so on? If "u'a" is like Lojban "la'e dei", it has some regression problems. I think I would do it as: le zrce lo cbno li blviko fi klma'ake where "lo cbno li blviko fi" may also be replaced by a unary operator. > 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. Or: le zrce lu bvu fu klma'ake co ma'a xrxe