Re: [long] Re: On the tense system

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

the vowels of co'a and co'u (and co'i) have nothing to do with ba'o etc.
and everything to do with the available cmavo at the time we assigned them.

We did choose to use the simple metaphor (used elsewhere such as the numbers)
of 'a' at the beginning and 'u' at the end - hence co'a and cou' and not
vice versa.  co'i is in a sense an "in the middle", though it really means
more like "all of the time between start and end taken at once", hence was
given the medial "i".

Far more often than not, the Lojban cmavo have little system, and/or that
system was constrained by the available words.  We didn't have elaborate
well-thought-out metaphors for assigning the words, but rather wanted to
have simple mnemonics usually tied to gismu.

We might have chosen to assign ba'o and pu'o in reverse, but that isn't the
metaphor we thought of.  I think in my case I internally transform
mi pu'o klama to mi pu'o lenu klama and pu'o thense into the
corresponding predicate (as yet unspecified) such that it translates
I am in the anticipation period of the event of (me) going.

This works semantically, but isn't something that people grasp on their own.
I am undecided right now whether to teach it the way I think it or to watch
how people who actually have a perfective system in their native language
do teh teaching (I gained a much more thorough grasp of ZAhO when I
learned Russian and relaized the usefulness of perfectives, especially when
contrasted with the aorist ca/pu/ba, which I think have been malglico overused
in historical Loglan and Lojban (Older Loglan versions had only the barest hint
of a perfective system and it was a poorly analyzed copy of either the
English or Esperanto system - I'm not sure which).

lojbab