First Steps in Lojban

Continuing our look at context tags, let's talk about aspect (or ZAhO cmavo). This tells you which phase of an event you're referring to.

Which phase? You mean like... stages?

Think about the act of running:

• The state before you start.
• The moment you begin.
• The act while it is ongoing.
• The moment you stop.
• The moment you finish.
• The state after you've finished.

Lojban has a specific tag for each of these "slices" of an event.

I see. So for something like "eating an apple," we could talk about being about to eat, starting to eat, being in the middle of eating, stopping, finishing, or having already eaten.

Exactly! And just like tense tags, these aspect tags go immediately before the selbri.

Right — it really is the tense follow-up: tags go before the selbri. So my try at the pattern would be:

mi pu'o citka lo plise I’m about to eat the apple.

mi co'a citka lo plise I begin eating the apple.

mi ca'o citka lo plise I’m eating the apple.

mi co'u citka lo plise I finish eating the apple.

mi ba'o citka lo plise I’ve already eaten the apple.

You can also combine tense and aspect! The standard order is tense first, then aspect.

mi pu zi ba'o citka lo plise A little while ago, I had just finished eating the apple.

Alright, let's try these! 1: la .soran. ca pu'o sipna 2: la .kocon. ca'o pinxe lo djacu ku lo rirxe ku 3: le melbi cipni pu zu ba'o cliva 4: Wait, "That man over there"... is that vu nanmu (far man)? So, lo vu nanmu ku?

Spot on. lo vu nanmu ku means "the distant man" or "that man over there."

Then 4 is: lo vu nanmu pu zi co'u jmive.

Exactly! Another nice side benefit: putting tense or aspect tags before a selbri also marks the start of the verb, acting much like the cu we learned earlier. It prevents "accidental tanru" from forming.

Oh, cool! So if a selbri is tagged, it can't be mistakenly swallowed as part of a compound word on its left.

Correct. And just like before, once you've built your tagged selbri, you can wrap the whole thing in lo … ku to turn it into a description.

So we can basically nominalize an entire phased event. That's powerful!