Aorist

[Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!lojbab>]

Mark Shoulson writes on conlang:
>There a
>zillions of different tenses and assorted verbal constructions, many of
>which really have all the same semantics (originally they may have been
>different, but by the time of Classical Sanskrit literature, they all
>collapsed to one, and the main reason for using an "aorist" rather than
>"imperfect" (all names given by Western grammarians, and have little or
>no bearing on what's actually there) to mean a simple past is which
>sounds more impressive.

Mark will find Lojban familiar - we have all the tenses needed to make
all the Sanskrit distinctions, and a few more besides.

There IS a semantic distinction between aorist past, the simple past of
English, and perfect.  But not in all sentences.  Take the English
sentence "I read the book".  The simple past here implies that you read
the book sometime in the past, and are not reading it now.  The perfect
past "I have read the book." says the same thing, but also explicitly
implies that the reading-event was completed:  you finished the book.
Aorist is a past that says nothing at all about either completion or
whether the action continues into the present.

English is of course irregular.  "He was alive" implies that he isn't
anymore, as well as "He was alive 5 minutes ago".  "He was alive during
World War II" makes no such implication, because the added information
suggests an alternate semantics for 'alive' than mere breathing:
experienced.

Lojban 'simple' tense is aorist.

mi pu          tcidu le  cukta
I  aorist-past read  the book

says that at some time in the past you were reading the book, not whether
you finished it, and not whether you might still be reading it.
Similarly

"mi pu jmive"  (I was alive)

makes no statement about whether I still am (ignoring the fact that I'm
the one stating this %^).

To match the English simple past clearly and exactly, you must say

mi pujecanai            tcidu le cukta
I  past-and-not-present read  the book

and to clearly say that the book-reading was completed, you get

mi ba'o                                            tcidu   le cukta
I  am-in-the-aftermath-of-the-normal-completion-of reading the book.

or you must use the predicate 'mulno'.

In most cases, the English distinction is unimportant - we use simple
past rely on context to imply whether the book was completed.  Similarly
in Lojban we tend to use no tense or the simple past, adding in the
other forms only when it is important to say whether you ares till
reading it or have completed it.  In English of course, you in effect
violate the normal tense interpretation to imply the aorist situation.
The aorist Lojban does not exclude the present tense.

It is an oversimplification for your Sanskrit professor to say that
these tenses made no difference.  They did (though it is possible that
they were so rare and complicated as to be oft misused).  Similarly with
the passive voice, which is considered pretentious in English.  It
changes emphasis, which can be important.

John Parks-Clifford (pc) has studied Indian logic in some depth, and he
notes that those enormously complex tenses and grammatical constructs
sometimes do make a difference in truth.  To us nowadays, though, the
difference might be akin to arguments about angels dancing on pins.
----
lojbab = Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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