Re: cmavo hit list - lojbab responds

[Logical Language Group <lojbab>]

la lojbab. cusku di'e

> But then you also have to realize the significance of "unrealized
> potential" in evaluating truth claims when potentiality/actuality is
> elliptical.  "jelca" means both "burns" and "is flammable".

I hasten to add, for the benefit of people who don't have the word
"flammable" in their dialect, that it means the same as the word "inflammable".
In the U.S. (and perhaps elsewhere), "flammable" is used on trucks to indicate
that the contents are inflammable, after it was discovered that some people
believe the "in-" prefix to be negative.  As Quine says, semiliteracy is not
a capital offense.  A similar confusion persists between "ravel" and "unravel".

> "pu'i
> jelca" is unambiguously "burnt" - the "-able" interpretation is
> eliminated.  "nu'o jelca" is unambiguously "-able" with denial of the
> actuality.  Both thus correspond to significantly occurring features in
> English (at least) that are strictly speaking not implied by other
> features of the language (actually, I have seen some argument that
> perfective "ba'o" and realized potential "pu'i" are close in meaning,
> but this is only because since I am not a speaker of a perfective
> language, I cannot easily think about perfective potentials as being
> useful ("perfective of being flammable" seems a lot less useful than
> "perfective of actually burning",

No problem.  Something is "ba'o nu'o jelca" if it can no longer burn, e.g.
it has been sprayed with flame retardant.  Something is "ba'o ca'a jelca"
if it has finished burning and gone out.

> so it would take a heavy context to
> have me recognize the former unmarked - but then that is why we might
> have ba'onu'o - to make such an oddity clear).

-- 
John Cowan		sharing account <lojbab@access.digex.net> for now
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban.