Re: [long] Re: On the tense system

[Jorge LLambias <jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU>]

>
> the vowels of co'a and co'u (and co'i) have nothing to do with ba'o etc.
> and everything to do with the available cmavo at the time we assigned them.
>
Serendipitous choice.


> We might have chosen to assign ba'o and pu'o in reverse, but that isn't the
> metaphor we thought of.  I think in my case I internally transform
> mi pu'o klama to mi pu'o lenu klama and pu'o thense into the
> corresponding predicate (as yet unspecified) such that it translates
> I am in the anticipation period of the event of (me) going.
>

I understand this. It's just inconsistent with the rest of the tenses.

It's easier to discuss ba'o than pu'o.

I suppose you translate ba'o as:

ba'o == "... is in the aftermath of (event)"

Which works fine, but you are saying that the speaker (or whatever is the
reference point) is in the aftermath of the event.

The equivalent from PU is:

pu == "... is in the future of (event)"

ie. the speaker is in the future of the event, and this corresponds
to _pu_


> This works semantically, but isn't something that people grasp on their own.
> I am undecided right now whether to teach it the way I think it or to watch
> how people who actually have a perfective system in their native language
> do teh teaching (I gained a much more thorough grasp of ZAhO when I
> learned Russian and relaized the usefulness of perfectives, especially when
> contrasted with the aorist ca/pu/ba, which I think have been malglico overused
> in historical Loglan and Lojban (Older Loglan versions had only the barest
 hint
> of a perfective system and it was a poorly analyzed copy of either the
> English or Esperanto system - I'm not sure which).
>

I'm not saying the ZAhO are not useful, on the contrary, I think the Lojban
tense system is powerful and siple, I like it very much. That's why I'm so
displeased with the confusion of pu'o and ba'o, which make it very difficult
to see the strong relationship they have with ba and pu respectively.

It would be much easier to see what is the significant difference between
ba'o and pu if it were more obvious that they both relate to past events.
One refers to the past event directly, the other to the present as
related to the concluded past event. As it is now, there is nowhere to
start from to get the meaning of ba'o, and if one starts from ba, one is
on the wrong track.

Maybe this is one of the reasons why they're not used as much as you'd like.


Jorge