History: Go outside

"go inside" can be translated as mo'i ne'i klama.

• No, that would imply that the klamaing is moving. ne'i klama would suffice. see fa'a - Dictionary. Since there is no other meaningful interpretation of ne'i klama this is obviously the best convention, in this context at least and (imnsho) also all situations which already show movement.

• The normal interpretation of ne'i klama is that the klamaing is inside (of something). "go inside" is�klama le nenri.

What is go outside? There is no FAhA which means the opposite of ne'i.

jbofi'e rejects mo'i to'e ne'i as ungrammatical.

Is the answer to'e mo'i ne'i klama?
What about mo'i ne'inai klama?
What's the difference between these two?

The Book is unclear (at least the online version; still waiting for the paper one). Section 10.18 "Tense negation" states that negating FAhA (or PU or ZAhO) with -nai is bridi negation. It also says that negating FAhA with to'e is scalar negation, so that to'ene'i means "outside" and na'ene'i means "not inside". But it doesn't say anything about negating mo'i constructions.

But section 20 "Logical and non-logical connections between tenses" seems to imply that the scope of -nai negation is actually the tense itself, rather than the bridi, since you can say punai je canai. Example 20.5 uses mo'izu'anai to mean "not leftward".

• Let me try to straighten this out. Contradictory negation (and tense negation with -nai is contradictory) is always bridi negation: it makes the bridi assert what is not the case, rather than what is the case. The notion of scope only makes sense to the degree that we have a logical connection and wish to show just what is logically connected. So punai is the same as na pu, but punai je canai broda means pu broda .inajenai ca broda. We certainly could have done without -nai on tenses, as it is never logically necessary, but since we have it, that's what it means.

• Scalar negation OTOH always has to be interpreted with some scale; what the scale is must, in the case of tightly woven constructs like tenses, be glorked.

I'm confused! The grammar parses the constructs like this: to'e (mo'i ne'i) and mo'i (ne'i nai). If I assume that semantics follows syntax, then the meaning becomes clear to me. But I've never seen that stated as an explicit principle.

• It's sometimes valid, but can't be relied on in general. In particular, mo'ine'inai" just means na mo'ine'i''.

• Many thanks for clearing this up! mi'e jezrax

Ignoring all the discussion below, I would like this seeming contradiction in the Book to be resolved. Is this an error that was corrected in the print version? Is it an error that should still be corrected? Is there some principle I'm not grasping behind the self-contradiction? Or is tense negation supposed to be confusing? — mi'e jezrax

nerkla and batkla, rather.

You mean barkla, of course. But surely the tense system can handle this! I don't want to have to make up a new lujvo or use an ambiguous tanru every time I come up with a new selbri in a context of outwardsly going. zo'oru'e

mo'i does not mix well with predicates that already involve motion by themselves. In mo'i klama you would be saying that the goer, the destination, the origin, the road and the vehicle are all moving, so mo'i ne'i klama is not "go inside" but rather it describes an event of going such that the whole event is moving into something (perhaps going from one car to the next on a train, as the train enters a tunnel). It is hard to think of non-ridiculous examples for mo'i.

The above paragraph, which seems to make out mo'i as nearly useless, contradicts the Book. The first example in chapter 10 section 8 is le verba mo'i ri'u cadzu le bisli, "The child walks toward my right on the ice." The explanation of mo'i is "the truth of the bridi itself depends on the result of a movement, or represents an action being done while the speaker is moving." — mi'e jezrax

So mo'i is unlike all other tenses, in that it does not indicate a property of the whole event, but rather a property of one of the sumti (is it always the one in x1?) or a property of the speaker. How can you tell when it refers to movement of a sumti and when to movement of the speaker?

I don't have any problem with taking the Book literally. If all it says about mo'i is "the truth of the bridi itself depends on the result of a movement, or represents an action being done while the speaker is moving," then that's all it means, and mo'i is vague. The nature of the dependence if it "depends on the result of a movement", or whether the speaker is considered to be moving, is to be glorked. This relies on the same principle as using bevri to refer to the waitron in a restaurant (see Lojban Style). — mi'e jezrax

Discussion of mo'i abridged from fa'a (Dictionary)

Using mo'i with a predicate that already by itself describes a motion is in my opinion wrong, because you are then saying that the moving event is itself moving. This could only happen in special situations, for example throwing an object while being inside a moving train, mo'i then describes the movement of the train, the whole event of throwing is moving with it, but mo'i is not the movement contained in renro. To talk about the direction of the throw, mo'i should not be used, so mo'izu'a doesn't work for "throw leftwards". The same applies to lafti. For "throw leftwards" the directional sense of fa'a can be used as fa'azu'a.--mi'e xorxes

• I note the Book has been studiously careful about avoiding double motion situations. I don't like this eliding mo'i business at all, because it makes the semantics of FAhA context-dependent. But I'll have to mull this over a bit. (Dammit, and the only reason I suggested fa'a as a dictionary example is because I thought this was a recent argued but settled debate. The more this goes on, the less I'm inclined to lift a finger to work on this dictionary project. And realistically, I doubt I will anyway...) — nitcion.
  • Whoever invented mo'i didn't stop to think for very long before doing it. What was needed was a way to indicate directions based on the FAhA locations, but somehow this was mangled with movement, and the result is that we have two useless cmavo: mo'i that says too much (it adds an unwanted movement to the wanted directionality), and fa'a that doesn't say anything (as a mere location, it is empty of meaning). My preferred solution to this is to ditch mo'i and use fa'a and to'o with their directional sense. — mi'e xorxes
    • mo'i was added because we did have examples of motion expressed in tense in natural language. Way back in the beginning, pc and I catalogued all the ways that we thought someone might want to express in tense, using pc's expertise as a tense logician and linguist. We apparently did not think of orientation distinct from position, or perhaps we did and pc felt that we should allow that to be expressed with a subordinate bridi, that being the always-workable alternative to tenses and modals. John Cowan reworked my original more clumsy tense design to be more explainable, and in so doing may have rendered some words like fa'a alone to seem superfluous. But by that time we were averse to removing words or features from the language without a reason that they were a negative feature. — lojbab
  • I found it rather clear - mo'i is only elided when the event is already one of moving. After all, we don't say things like lenu muvdu cu muvdu, do we? I have never had cause to describe a motion as being moving outside of hypothetical questions about math or physics. Thus, since mo'i has that meaning, that the event is moving, it makes movement sentences quite confusing. Besides, the direction of the raising in my example is toward heaven. It rises, and the direction of the rising is toward heaven. That is as much direction rather than mo'ifa'a-type movement as speaking with the direction of the speaking being a microphone. The fact that it is moving just obfuscates that, but we want to discuss the direction of movement, not the movement of the movement. - mi'e kreig.daniyl.
    • Speaking of the motion of a predicate of moving sounds like the sort of thing that could be very useful in talking about relativity theory and thought experiments. Perhaps someone could try testing this arena of Lojban tense design with a translation/description of one of the thought experiments that went into Einstein's work. — lojbab
      • Then there will be yet more usage supporting the idea that "mi muvdu mo'ifa'a le zdani" will mean "I move, and the movement is itself moving toward the house," - and to say "I move toward the house," one uses "mi muvdu fa'a le zdani." - mi'e. kreig.daniyl.

.e'u mo'ito'o .a mo'ize'o .a na'efa'a .a zo'inai

.i pau mo'ito'o mo sa'e

Doesn't seem to work. These space tense cmavo all refer to moving toward or away from a point, or arriving at or leaving a point. But going from inside to outside or vice versa is not moving relative to a point, it's crossing a boundary--the boundary between the inside and the outside. You can move toward or arrive at any point without necessarily crossing a boundary. (Any suggestions involving te'e or pa'o?)

If fa'a is reused as an analogue to mo'i to indicate the direction of an action (note that it is entirely grammatical to do this), then to'o can indicate the action being oriented in the opposite direction. So this could be to'ozo'i if you maintain that there is no specific point outside they are going toward, or fa'aze'o as a lax version that makes a bit more sense. No mo'i is needed, because the movement is contained in muvdu.

-> fa'a as orientation