Re: [engelang] Xorban: la je cmla nltra - engelang messages

On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 7:37 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@hidden.email> wrote:

On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 9:36 PM, Mike S. <maikxlx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Next two sentences:
> http://www3.sympatico.ca/gaston.ringuelet/lepetitprince/chapitre01.html
> "Ça représentait un serpent boa qui avalait un fauve. Voilà la copie du
> dessin."
>
> http://home.pacific.net.hk/~rebylee/text/prince/1.html
> "It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal.
> Here is a copy of the drawing."
>
> The E translation is a loose one. My attempt at Xb:
>
> lo je rnjo fo la je li dnli tnlaki qbo'aqa sinxa'iko. la tja la'i
> cskxra'i fkpaka'i.
>
> "lo je rnjo fo" is my attempt at the imperfective [aspect]. Suggestions
> welcome.

I'm failing to parse the first sentence because "la je li dnli tnlaki
qbo'aqa" is not a full formula. The way I would do it is:

la je lo rnjo fo li dnli tnlaki qbo'aqa snxa'ika

Sorry, that was a hasty post. What I think that I meant was

lo je rnjo fo la li dnli tnlaki qbo'aqa sinxa'iko.

I like your translation better though. Mine says something about an animal-swallower continuously being a boa, which is not right.

where "lo rnjo fo" can be assigned a unary operator for imperfective
aspect. Although if "rnj" means "continuous", that's not really the
predicate we want, we want "ongoing", i.e. "already started and not
yet finished", rather than "uninterrupted", "without holes". To me
"continuous" is not the same as "continuing".

I think that the two most basic aspects that we'll want to mark are perfective and imperfective, but I don't know what L brivla express them (I checked your BPFK aspect section, and it's clear that "ca'o" is the right cmavo for imperfective). I agree that "continuous" is not right. I guess we can just make up some new predicates if L lacks them.

As far as L "ba'o", I am not sure that is a perfective marker. I think that's a perfect marker, or maybe it covers both.

There seems to be some sort of connection between the imperfective/perfective distinction and mass/count distinction. I wonder if we can get away with "in some one [whole/complete] event" for the perfective aspect, and "in some event-mass" for the imperfective. I can't think of anything that really feels right though.