Re: tense conversions

> la kris cusku di'e
> 
> > In other words, I think "le bolci pu'o farlu" means "the ball will start
> > falling", not "the ball is about to fall".

la xorxes. cusku di'e

> Are you saying that {ca pu'o} means the same as {ba co'a}? I don't agree.

That doesn't follow.  As I said the other day, {ba co'a} entails nothing
about the present; the event might already be in progress.  {ca pu'o} excludes
that possibility.

> I think the difference between those two is precisely that the first
> describes the present and the second describes the future. For a claim
> about the present to be true, the actual future is irrelevant. For a claim
> about the future to be true, what is claimed must end up happening in
> the future.

I grant the second point, but I deny the first one.  The claim about the
present is precisely that we are in the {pu'o} portion of an actual event.
(Note:  in the following, <verb> is a notation for a tenseless claim.)

Consider the world line of the ball.  There either <is> or <isn't> a ball-
falling-event somewhere along that world line.  If there <is> one, then
it is the case that for some t1, at time t1 we <are> in the "pu'o" portion
of that event.  If no such event <exists>, then there can be no such time
t1, and in particular, the claim that t1 = the present is necessarily false.

But someone making such a claim is not lying, because claims about the
future are not lies.  This is a fact about claims, not about the future.
To lie is to say what you know is not true, and since you don't know the
future (even though the world-line model presumes that the future is
knowable), any claim with "ba" or "pu'o" cannot be a lie unless it
claims something that you now know to be impossible.

-- 
John Cowan					cowan@ccil.org
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban.