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Xod: > On Sun, 6 Oct 2002, And Rosta wrote: > > > Xod: > > > Naturally, I find the fact that there are no natlang analogs to xoi'a > > and > > > xoi'e (especially with respect to a direct treatment of "linear" and > > > "exponential" functions) a very Good Thing. > > > > But for something that needn't be expressed by a cmavo but could be > > expressed by a lujvo instead, isn't the evidence of natlangs useful > > in suggesting which concepts are needed often enough to warrant > > being expressed by a cmavo? > > Lojban has introduced the concept of the "grammatical orthogonality" of > tense and statement; the tenses can be inserted into statements at will, > without grammatically affecting the rest of the statement. And in a sense, > conceptually, the idea of tense is a meta-comment on the statement and > shouldn't really have impact its structure. If you can't appreciate the > clean elegance here, I can't say much more than this, and several rounds > of debates about it won't help anyone. But this is why I think these > concepts really should be tenses and not (only) lujvo. I would hate to be someone who can't appreciate clean elegance, but I think that a tense cmavo C as a sumti (tcita) or selbri tcita within bridi B is equivalent to C(B): i.e. the tense is a predicate and the bridi is its argument. If I seem to you so blind that it seems almost pointless to make the effort you explain your views again, I will sympathize, because I feel the same from time to time (not with you in particular), but if you do want to try to get me to see your point-of-view, I would be interested. --And.