Re: A question about space tenses (delayed response)

["Jorge J. Llambias" <jorge@INTERMEDIA.COM.AR>]

Lojbab:
> >>> I would have no problem with
> >>> le xrabo cu mo'izu'a ciskaXorxes:
> >The movements involved in producing the writing are mostly irrelevant to
> >the event of writing.Lojbab:
> That seems to be what we are debating about %^)

Indeed. Many debates in this list start with something relevant and
end up degenerating into something like this. The point I wanted to
make was that some events have orientation _without_ movement. Obviously
I thought that whatever movement was involved in writing was irrelevant,
but you didn't.

Let me change the example. Consider these two sentences:

1-      le nixli cu renro le bolci le nanla
        The girl throws the ball to the boy.

2-      le nixli cu catlu le nanla
        The girl looks at the boy.

Both involve a direction, the first with movement, the second
without it.

Now let's say that the boy is to the left of the girl from where
I'm standing. I want to add "leftwards" to both of those sentences.
With one interpretation of "mo'i", I could do it for (1):

1a-     le nixli mo'izu'a renro le bolci le nanla
        The girl leftwards throws the ball to the boy.

But for (2) I get some different meaning:

2a-     le nixli mo'izu'a catlu le nanla
        The girl leftwards looks at the boy
        (girl & boy are moving towards the left,
        perhaps they're in a train and I'm seeing
        them from the platform).

Now the question is, how come (1a) doesn't mean that the whole
event moves left, rather than just the ball? If mo'i was just
for orientation, then it could be used in both cases with the
"useful" sense. Since it involves a redundant movement, it
cannot be used in (2) with the useful orientation sense, and
it makes the use in (1) suspect, when compared with (2).

On farna:
> It says nothing about the direction you are facing.  If you were in
> Spain, then you and Mecca are in the same direction, and it probably
> doesn't matter which of {you, Mecca} is the directional standard for the
> other.  I can say that the sun is in direction the constellation of
> Aquarius, or I can say that the constellation Aquarius is in the
> direction of the sun.  Thus I suspect reanalysis of farna will show that
> the x1 and x2 places are essentially interchangeable, and it is more a
> question of being clear which one is being used as the standard.

That makes sense. Then farna has nothing to do with orientation, only
with position, and it essentially means x1 and x2 are on the same
direction from x3. Which one of x1 and x2 is the standard for the other
is given by the context, just as which is the standard in x1 x2 zunle.

> But of course you ARE close to being in the direction of Mecca, if I am
> planning to fly over the South Pole to get there.  Nothing says that the
> path must be a great circle.

Common sense does. That's the natural way of defining direction on
a sphere.

> Indeed, if one wants to get picky, the
> direct line from here to Mecca is a chord through the solid earth, and
> nothing below the horizon can be said to be in "the same direction" as
> something visible.

Only if you restrict farna to direction in Euclidean 3-d. Why would
we want to do that?

> But that is when logic has to give way to
> pragmatics.

There's no conflict with logic here that I can see. Just with getting
the right semantics of farna.

> >> An orientation gismu
> >> would have a place structure like "x1 is facing in direction
> >> x2", with no separate "origin" point (since x2 is the origin!).
> >
> >Lojbab proposed crane. That gives selcra: x1 faces towards x2.
> >(What is the x3 of crane for, BTW?)
>
> It was intended to enable making clear some kind of oblique "facing" My
> driver's side door faces west in the frame of reference of the car
> facing north.

Wouldn't that be something like:

     le vorme cu selcra le stici va'o le nu le karce cu selcra le berti

I don't see why that is a frame of reference rather than a condition.
I suspect the intention was different: If x2 does not have a natural
face, then put something in x3 with a natural face and define the side
of x2 that faces x3 as the face of x2. Then you can say:

        le bolci cu crane le tricu mi
        The ball is in front of the tree with respect to me.

The tree does not normally have a front, but it does have a side
facing me, so that becomes its front. Really complicated, and I doubt
it is really necessary, since there is ragve for this kind of three
way position relationship.

> >But I'm not sure whether this is a general solution. Can we say:
> >
> >        le nu ciska bau la rabybau cu selcra le zunle
> >        Writing in Arabic faces left.
>
> You don't think that when one person approaches the other, the event of
> talking between them also approach (each of) them, and then ask me to
> agree that the "front face" of the wirting even is in the left
> direction?  %^) I have REAL trouble talking about fronts and backs of
> events, though I can conceive of places it might be useful.

Then how do you talk about orientation of events that don't have
movement? That was my original understanding of fa'a. If crane
is not the general solution either, and we've already ruled out farna,
what do we use?

> >Or if mo'i itself was just about orientation. It is never really
> >needed to add movement.
>
> It seems to me that YOU are the one constraining mo'i to refer to only
> useless kinds of motion.

Just trying to be consistent. If it refers to the movement of
the reference frame in some cases, shouldn't it refer to that
in all cases? If not, how do you know in which cases you are
using it that way and in what cases you are using it for the
natural movement of the event, for which you don't need to add
the "movement" information, only the orientation one?

Jorge