Re: tense conversions

["Peter L. Schuerman" <plschuerman@UCDAVIS.EDU>]

On Sat, 30 Sep 1995, Logical Language Group wrote:

> The obviosu question - have you read the tense paper in the reference grammar
> before trying this.  indeed, writing about any aspect of the grammar without
> reading the appropriate refgrammar papaer is folly.

I read the "Imaginary Journeys" document.  I agree that trying to do this
with no informational basis would be folly.  I believe that what I wrote
was consistent with the IJ document.

> Second comment is that the English tenses generally do NOT have exact and
> consistent Lojban equivalents, and I am thus wary of suggesting that any
> of your suggestions are "right".  For one thing, they will lead to
> great overexpression of tenses that are not needed or appropriate in Lojban.

I don't believe the connection you make is necessarily true.  Will a list
of English-to-Lojban tense conversions really cause people to use tenses
incorrectly?  If that list is thoughtfully made, then I doubt it.  In
creating such a list, the intent should be to use Lojban's clarity to
define the true meaning of English's idiomatic tense expressions (which,
by contrast, are not very clear).

> Your suggested new
> "tenses" are an excelllent example of the problem of looking for word for
> word structure for structure mappings.  These are simply things that are
> not conveyed in Lojban tenses as they are in English tenses.

I can see your point, here, but just because Lojban tenses don't have a
general way of conveying intent or affirmation, does that mean they should
not?  There are already at least two event contours which convey specific
sorts of intent; these are de'a or "pausitive" which conveys the intent to
resume, and pu'o or "inchoative" which can convey the intent to initiate.

Ultimately, the choice of whether intent or affirmation will be conveyed
by tense, by adjectives, by prepositions, etc. is a matter of
aesthetics.  de'a and pu'o lead me to believe that tenses could be used
to convey intent and affirmation, but there are, of course, other
options.  What ways would you recommend for communicating these ideas in
Lojban?

> Lojban on the
> other hand conveys a lot of things in tense that English does not convey,
> so many of your suggestions are not the ONLY applicable Lojban equivalent.

Right.  More information could be added to the suggested Lojban tenses.
The suggestions are a bare-bones minimum.  For instance, none of them
contains an interval; a speaker could add an interval, though, to any of
these.  The suggestions are more of a starting place... they convey the
simple meaning (hopefully) of the English tenses, and can be modified as
necessary.  Alternately, completely different tenses could be formed; as
long as the student is aware that these are suggested tense conversions
are simply options and not dogma, there should be no problem.

> You would probably do better to go from all Lojban tense expressions to
> some corresponding English expression, and then reverse and sort the results,
> since there are more Lojban tenses.

... and most of those have no simple English equivalent.  The list you
advocate would be enormous!  And, I think, not particularly helpful to
anyone.  I think it would be more helpful for a beginning student to have
a relatively short list which shows what their native language's tenses
can look like in Lojban, as long as they understand that these conversions
can be further modified, and that there are tenses available in Lojban
which are not available in their native language.  Such a list would be
discarded as the student progresses in Lojban, but would represent a
significant inroad to learning the material initially.  This would be much
better than the current approach which I've seen in the various
introductory papers and lessons, which is to ignore tense because it is
(initially) too complex.  In fact, nearly every example in these materials
is incorrect because they assume a tense (usually present) that isn't
actually there, and that is going to be very misleading in the long run...
the student will have to unlearn the habit of forming tenseless bridi with
the expectation that they are using the present tense.

co'o mi'e pitr.                                 plschuerman@ucdavis.edu