Re: Aorist

[And Rosta <cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!ucleaar>]

Were these different Skt tenses equivalent (& different) in the way
	I like beans
	Beans I like.
	John kissed Mary
	Mary was kissed by John.
are? Or was there really no difference whatever? Synonymy is very rare
in language, so I either doubt yr claim, or wonder whether you're
speaking of a time at which Skt was dead & had developed into the
Prakrits & was used only as a classical tongue. If scholars chose to
apply the label 'aorist' to some tense, this does suggest that at some
time it was associated with imperfective aspect, no?

>its Skt name), was traditionally used for "past tense at which I was not
>present", as opposed to past tense observed by the narrator (and, by
>extension, it was also used for cases in which the narrator felt he wasn't
>there owing to mental disorientation, as drunkenness.  The example my book
>had was "I babbled like an idiot before the king".  Even though the speaker
>was present, this form might be used stylistically).
This is very interesting. Is this presence/absence feature isolated, or
is it part of a larger system of evidential modality? If the verb with
the presence/absence feature occurs within a subordinate clause (e.g. _Sophy
knew that Arthur wept_), does this mean that the speaker was present/absent
with respect to Arthur's weeping, or could it mean that Sophy was
present/absent? Can lojban show the difference? Do its evidentials &
other modal particles have an argument for perceiver, believer,
obligator, etc., that defaults to 'speaker' but can be specified as
someone else (Sophy in the above example)?
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And.