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On Sun, Dec 15, 2002 at 06:49:37PM -0500, Invent Yourself wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Dec 2002, Jordan DeLong wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 15, 2002 at 03:30:44AM -0500, Invent Yourself wrote:
> > > On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, Jordan DeLong wrote:
> > > > On Sat, Dec 14, 2002 at 06:17:36PM -0500, Invent Yourself wrote:
> > > > > Book says explicitly that ti is only used for finger pointables; I need
> > > > > something abstract.
> > > >
> > > > Not sure what you mean by "something abstract". But it's usable
> > > > for anything which has distance from the speaker (conceptually).
> > > > The book goes out of its way to say that you don't need to be
> > > > face-to-face for this to work. All the "finger pointing" stuff is
> > > > just a metaphor.
> > >
> > > "...they cannot refer to things that cannot be pointed at."
> >
> > "In written text, on the other
> > hand, the meaning of the ti-series is inherently vague; is the writer to be
> > taken as pointing to something, and if so, to what? In all cases, what counts
> > as ``near'' and ``far away'' is relative to the current situation."
>
> There is no way you can possibly misinterpret the above to mean that ti
> can refer to unpointable things in the way that ko'a or da can.
This "pointing" stuff is just a metaphor---stop paying so much
attention to it. ti/ta/tu can represent anything which has a
(conceptual or real) distance from the speaker, or the spoken-to.
I've not been arguing that it can serve every purpose that ko'a can
(it can't), just that it gives you one kind of the vague ref thing
that you were whining about (though overuse of such things would
be unfortunate from a SW perspective, because it makes the language
more everyotherlang-like).
--
Jordan DeLong - fracture@hidden.email
lu zo'o loi censa bakni cu terzba le zaltapla poi xagrai li'u
sei la mark. tuen. cusku
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