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>Xod:
> > 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.
At first, I liked also the idea of tense as meta-comment, though maybe more
on a semantic level: the idea, which I have already tried in another
context, is that using a tense is equivalent to make two different claims,
and therefore could be acted upon grammatically and semantically
independently (for instance by negation).
Unfortunately, the CLL itself spoils this idea in lojban by stating that:
{na pu broda} is exactly the same as {punai broda} (except for emphasis).
In my understanding of meta-comments, these should be semantically very
different, with {punai broda} still claiming {broda}, and {na pu broda}
claiming only {pu broda} as false. The elegance, very subjectively, would
have been much greater, but this would require a change to the CLL
that would...., well you know :-)
And:
> 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.
This interpretation seems right to me for lojban, IMO following the CLL
prescription (BTW, this is the explicit solution AFAIK used in gua!spi,
which may indicate that the tense cmavo were indeed seen as true
predicate in early Loglan or lojban).
-- Lionel