First Steps in Lojban
Lesson 12. Tense: time and space
Tense in Lojban is straightforward: just put a PU-series word immediately before the selbri.
- ca
- now
- pu
- before (past)
- ba
- after (future)
mi ca citka lo plise I am eating the apple now.
mi pu citka lo plise I ate an apple (in the past).
mi ba citka lo plise I will eat an apple (later).
- citka
- x1 eats x2
- plise
- x1 is an apple …
Simple enough. But what do you mean by "tag"?
ca, pu, and ba are what we call tags. They "stick" to the following word and give it a specific time or place context. For now, we'll just stick them onto the selbri.
Got it. They're like little context stickers!
Compound tags
You can get even more specific by adding distance words after your time direction: zi for "near" and zu for "far."
|
zi |
zu | |
|---|---|---|
|
pu |
a little before |
long ago |
|
ba |
soon |
far future |
- zi
- short distance in time (after PU)
- zu
- long distance in time (after PU)
mi pu zi citka lo plise I ate an apple a short while ago.
mi ba zu citka lo plise I’ll eat an apple in the distant future.
Direction plus distance—that's a neat little system.
That creates a compound tag. And we can take it even further by adding duration: ze'i for a short duration and ze'u for a long one.
- ze'i
- short extent of interval
- ze'u
- long extent of interval
mi pu ze'i bajra I ran for a short time in the past.
mi ba zi ze'u bajra I'll soon be running for a long time.
- bajra
- x1 runs on x2 …
So the order goes: Direction → Distance → Duration. I think I can remember that.
Space: FAhA, VA, VEhA
The exact same pattern works for space too! In Lojban, time and space use the same parallel structure (we call both "tense" in a broad sense).
The template is: Direction → Distance → Dimension (area/region).
FAhA (direction), VA (distance), VEhA (extent).
- ca'u
- in front of...
- ri'u
- to the right of...
- zu'a
- to the left of...
- vi
- near (the spatial version of zi)
- vu
- far (the spatial version of zu)
- ve'i
- small region (spatial duration)
- ve'u
- large region (spatial duration)
le nanmu ba zi ze'u ca'u vu ve'u bajra That man will, a bit later, for a long time, run far ahead in a wide area.
That's a lot of little words to stack up, but at least the template is consistent.
Wait, we didn't use any of these tags in the earlier lessons. What tense were those sentences in?
Tense is completely optional. If you don't use any tags, the time and place are just understood from context—much like how Japanese leave things like singular/plural or tense vague when it's already obvious.
But will people actually understand me?
Of course! Natural languages leave out massive amounts of detail all the time, and we still communicate just fine.
Alright, so the lesson is: omit the tags when it's clear, and add them when you need to be precise.
True or false
Pick whether each statement is true or false according to the lesson.
When composing tense cmavo, the order is “PU, then ZEhA, then ZI”.
When composing locationals, the order is “FAhA, then VA, then VEhA”.
The composition rules for tense clusters and for locationals are fundamentally different.