On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Ian Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:
> Do duration questions force you to make an assumption about the relative
> length of the duration? That is, as I understand it a typical duration
> question might be:
> .i ti zdani do ze'a ma
> roughly "how long have you been living in this house?", with the
> expectation that the duration to come is moderate in length. (Not sure if I
> should have another tense in there like {ca'o}, but that's another
> question.) And yet, it seems like if the answer were, say, {lo cabdei}
> (imagining the person just moved in today), that the corresponding sentence
> would be:
> .i ti zdani mi ze'i lo cabdei
> since living in a house for a day is a pretty short time, as time spent
> living in houses goes. Is there any way around this implicit assumption,
> short of asking a slightly different question like "when did you move into
> this house?"?
>
I take {ze'a} (and its kin {za}, {ve'a}, and {va}) to mean not only
"medium", but also "unspecified". Others follow this usage as well, even
though it's not strictly in accordance with the definition. So, {[.i ti
zdani mi ze'a] lo cabdei} is a reasonable answer to the question.
mu'o mi'e komfo,amonan
