Re: TECH: only, {me} place structure

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

I would say that "only" as used colloquially probably means something like
(within the limited universe of discourse relevant to this conversation,
I am claiming that the predicate holds for this value and no other; but I make
no claim involving this predicate in terms of some wider universe of discourse)

I think the various efforts to express only using forms of "and no other" come
pretty close, but those have multiple forms depending on the exact grammatical
situation of the "only".  Thus the request for a discursive is for a short
and grammatically free way of saying this, and not for a semantically nebulous
concept - we would do our best to have a very specific definition.

In the case of "just" and "still", these may be expressible using a complex
tense, also involving negation.  "just" means something like.  "was not
previously and just recently became true".  "still" is something like
"has been for some time, and continues to be now" with a possible subtext
of expectation that it will not be so in the future (but I'm not sure that
is the essence of the word).  In both cases, it seems that you might want to
emphasize that the relation among all the sumti has this particular time
'signature', or you might wish to emphasize that for a particular sumti
within the relationship, this time 'signature' is being claimed.

The latter phrasing leads us back to the idea that these two concepts might
be tenses, but might better be considered as predicates in themselves,
being a relations between a timeless, non-specific, predicate, a particular
sumti, and a tense.  However we do not at this point have a direct way to
convert a tense to a normal, place-filling sumti; this thus might point up a
(small) hole in the langauge, one which we would normally fill be using the
gismu related to the tenses like "purci"/"balvi"/"cabna".  But we don't
have a way to convert these complex tenses into a selbri, either.

Hmm, we also in English use "just" and "only" synonymously to express the
xxxx cancel that.  I was thinking of a phrase like "only yesterday" or
"just yesterday" which seems to be close to the above4 definition of "just"
though maybe others will see a different meaning.  It isn;t the main meaning of
"just" that I was referring to, as embodied in phrases like "just now" and
"just then".

lojbab