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| In a message dated 10/7/2002 3:44:48 PM Central Daylight Time, nessus@hidden.email writes: << At first, I liked also the idea of tense as meta-comment, though maybe more >> What two claims? That of the tenseless bridi (that it is true in some world or other -- almost trivial except for contradictions) and that it is true in particular in some world past to this one (or future or identical)? But then, the whole reduces to the second question. I suppose what is wanted is a transparent PU, so either metalinguistic or at least containing no quantifiers. The metalinguistic version is not a second claim but merely a semantic rule about when the PU is attached, namely after everything else is settled, so ending up in front of even the selbri-hugging negation. So, what is current usage (if any): to deny (ko'a pu broda} do we use {ko'a pu naku broda} or {koa puroroi /roroi pu naku broda} (both parse, but the break suggests that I want the first "throughout the whole past ko'a does not broda" rather than "it is always the case that ko'a brodaed in the past," which requires infinite past time at least)? Surely, we need both and it is too bad (but correctable given that no syntax change is involved?) that {PUnai} can't be used for the former and {na pu} for the latter (the parser actually gives {pu na} the grouping wanted for {pu naku} above and {punai} a different one and {pu naku} and even more different one -- Lord, I wish these parses were reliable for structure as well as the simple yes/no grammatical question -- which amounts to the hopeless wish that the grammar's categories all made some sense, rather than just being convenient.) << 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). >> Well, I think it is probably dead wrong for Lojban, because I think Lojban would come down for the {pu roroi naku} solution (i.e., that {pu} = {pu su'oroi}) and I am reasonably sure that it was thus in Loglan and ever since (I remember looking in Loglan for convenient expressions for the duals of {pu} and {ba} ). |