Re: GEN: almost-PROPOSAL: intervals

[Goran Topic <topic@STUDENT.MATH.HR>]

> >Something in that line almost works, though:
> >
> >... co'a le puzi nanca belipimu
>
> That was my intent - at the inception of the previous adjacent 6 month period.
>
> >But I find it clumsy. Less so than using temci, but also less precise.
>
> Not sure why it seems less precise. Inchoative is a point event. and we
> are define the point by means of the interval.

co'a is precise. zi isn't. So, lo puzi mentu can be just the previous minute,
or it can mean the minute five minutes ago.

However, after thinking for a while, this actually works (I think); it's
precisely, but even more clumsy:

co'a le caze'apu nanca belipimu

> Clumsy - well that is an
> aesthetic consideration and one you may be better able to make than I.
> Especially since you are a native speaker of a language with perfectives.

It's arcane. ZA/xe'i/ZA+NOI/ZA+GOI is equally important concept in
imaginary journeys stuff as PU and ZEhA and ROI and spatial equivalents
FAhA, VEhA and fe'e+ROI. All of them are really trivial. You se {ba da},
you know what it means. Even when you see {be'adu'amo'i fe'eciroi} a
rather complex tense, you know perfectly well where the thing happens.
You see {co'a le caze'apu bu'a}, equivalent in complexity to {pu da},
and you know nothing unless you a) think about what this means for 15
seconds minimum, or b) you know it as a *phrase*. Secondly, if you use
it as a phrase (I don't think myself capable to use something like this
naturally, off-the-cuff), you need to know *two* different ones just for
the temporal meaning: {co'a le caze'apu bu'a} and {co'u le caze'aba
bu'a}, since you *have* to express the direction of the distance
together with the distance itself. This gets even more complicated in
spatial tenses: {fe'eco'u le bu'uve'abe'a bu'a}. Imagine saying "It's
three metres to the right" as {ko'a zvati fe'eco'u le bu'uve'ari'u mitre
be li ci}. I just can't. I don't think I will ever be fluent enough to
fire off a ma'orpoi like that. I have trouble memorising spatial tenses,
and you want me to say two every time I want to specify a *distance*?
What if you just want to say the distance, without mentioning the
direction? Like, I am talking with bu'uki switched on, and I want to say
"It is 10 m from here". I'd say "ko'a zvati [fe'e]xe'i lo mitre be li
pano" (I still don't know if fe'e is necessary, but no other tense works
both spatially and temporally, so I'm putting it in just in case).
xorxes would use {va lo mitre...}, under vei,on's non-proposal it would
come out as {vanoi mitre...}. I don't know how to say this using
cessative and intervals, since I don't know how to specify an interval
that starts at a specified point without specifying endpoint. {ve'abu'u}
I presume wouldn't work - if it parallels {ze'aca} then it means
interval that includes here (bu'u) as any one of its points. Right? The
only thing I can think of is to work around this, and specify ve'ize'o,
but that is not quite what I want to say.

You see now what I mean by clumsy? It is an important tense feature if
one bothers to speak in tenses at all, and it should be expressible with
constructs of similar level of complexity, or maybe just a little higher
(like vei,on's non-proposal, which is a bit more complex pe'i, although
shorter and elegant).

> BTW>> ca'o le  puzi nanca belipimu
> >
> >during the close-past .5-year
>
> should mean under perfective languages that I went throughout the close-past
> .5 year, and hence that I was in Glasgow for the last 6 months, not for a
> short period within that 6 months.

Right. That's what I mean.

> At least from my Russian understandings
> the use of a perfective when describing two events means that they coexist in
> time, and I have read at least the strong implication that one even is not
> substantially different in time spread than the other.  Is this true for
> Croatian?

I am sorry, I can't make this out. If you are really interested, give me
an example in English and Russian and tag parts of speech in the latter,
and I'll try to tell you what it would look like in Croatian. I don't
understand what you mean by "use of perfectives when describing two
events". I can't think of a way to describe two events at once, except
by putting one into participle form. The other way is using connectives.
The connective and the tense I use would implicate when things happen
in relation to each other.

This sounds confusing. That's 'cause I'm confused. Send me a couple of
examples, I'll try to figure them out, OK?

co'o mi'e. goran.