cliva

[Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!GREBYN.COM!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!lojbab>]

Bob Chassell gave a good answer or two on Bruce's question, but may
not have fully answered what Bruce was asking.

You fire a gun into the air.  The bullet leaves the chamber.  Where is
it 'going to'?  Nowhere in particular.  Sure, it will probably stop
moving sometime, but when we talk about 'cliva' we are making no claim.
Hmmm.  Maybe I should have said "NASA fired a Pioneer into interstellar
space."  When you leave a party, you must inherently leave by some
route. it is irrelevant to the claim 'Bruce left the party' where you
ended up.  (Lojban is not symmetric, by the way - it has no 'arrive'
gismu, though there was a lot of debate.  One could claim that we thus
have a bias towards Big Bang or Creationism, since we presume in the
existing set of words that every motion has a starting point.  But of
course if someone needs it, they'll add the word.

Chris Handley pointed this up.  I would answer him by using 'gravity' or
'launching joi falling joi rocket/jet' as the means, or simply say that
they fallingly-travel (farlu litru), which ignore how they got there.
The lujvo for this might indeed drop the 'from' and 'to' places of
'farlu' because the point of the lujvo is to eliminate, not add.
(Another place where dikyjvo don't work).  In complex systems (actually
in all of them) the orbiting objects fall around their center of
gravity.  (They all move by some route though - who cares whether they
chose it?)

But language, outside of extreme technical situations (I don't want to
raise relativistic tenses again), is intended for everyday human
communication.  So are our place structures.

lojbab