la djan spuda tu'ami di'e sa'enai
> I'm fairly sure this is wrong, because I know that BAI and tenses are
> not parallel, but I don't have a firm grasp on what's wrong with it, for
> two reasons: 1) I haven't yet written the paper on place structures, 2)
> I slept very badly last night.
I know that there are differences, but I think the parallel does go quite
a way.
> Your account also fails to explain the "BAI gi ... gi" construction, which
> works well for tenses (which do have an implicit 2nd place, viz. the
> space-time origin), but may be very shaky for BAIs.
I think that in the sense in which tenses do have an implicit second place,
so do BAI, but certainly it is not nearly so well-defined.
I think there is in fact a FORMAL parallel between tesnes and BAI in all their
uses, though the semantics are consistently different.
The more I think about it, the more dubious I am about
<stag> gi ... gi
As you say, my account doesn't explain the BAI case - but I don't know
what the 'tense' case is about either!
It seems to me that
<tense> gi .. gi
will always mean
... .e/je/gi'e <tense> bo ...
but is distressingly unparallel, in that the logical (or non-logical)
connective is not expressed (indeed, cannot be expressed).
What does
pugi mi gi do cu klama
mean?
Is it asserting that we both go?
mi .epubo do cu klama
or
*ge mi gipubo do cu klama
(not I think currently grammatical)
or is it another of these covert raisings as with *mo'u?
lenu mi klama cu balvi lenu do go'i
I think we should get rid of it, but allow <stag> BO after a GI.
> This pops up for me when I want to say something universal, but where the
> natural gismu seems to want an agent: "Living things are made from cells
> [by whom?]", "Set A can be divided into sets B and [jo'u] C [who does the
> dividing?]", etc. English gets away with a passive here, because the passive
> in English does not commit you to the existence of an agent; not so SE
> conversion, which does not eliminate any places. Without this gimmick,
> the only way to eliminate places is to make a lujvo and just say "This
> obnoxious place doesn't exist in this lujvo". But (as Nick rightly
> points out) there then needs to be a way to re-express the meaning of the
> lujvo in terms of a tanru.
This is dangerous, because it lets malglico in by the back door. 'zbasu' has
a maker in its tergismu for good reason. If you don't happen to believe that
living things have a zbasu in their history, then it is not appropriate to
use 'zbasu'. The argument that 'ne'e zbasu' is a different selbri reeks of
sophistry, and looks to me like a way of avoiding thinking about what you
really mean.
mi'e kolin