Re: Go and come

Roger Mills wrote:
>Yes, such verbs are very interesting. In the case of go/come, however, I
>think the important distinction (as with many other "reciprocal" verbs) is
>"toward speaker ~toward focus of discourse" vs. "away from speaker
~focus".
>
>Others with a similar focus distinction would be lend/borrow, buy/sell,
>give/receive, bring/take (=carry), maybe put/take(away). Some Austronesian
>languages use the same bases for some of these pairs, usually with
different verbal affixes.
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Ithkuil treats all such verbs as complementary stems derived from a single
root, where the distinction between the two stems is perspectival in
nature, since from a third party's perspective, the same exact event or
action is taking place.  In fact, Ithkuil extends this perspectival
complementarity to descriptive situations, not just actions, and usually
calls for suppression of the distinction unless consciously intended by
the speaker.  For example, compare these two sentences:

1) The path climbs steeply out of the canyon.
2) That path descends steeply into the canyon.

Both of these sentences are describing the same property of the path — its
steepness. The distinction in the sentences comes from the point of view
being reflected by the speaker. In sentence (1) the implied point of view
is from the bottom of the canyon upward, while in sentence (2) the
viewpoint is from the top of the canyon downward.

What is important is that, semantically, the point of view is of no
relevance to the steepness of the path per se. The "climb out"
vs. "descend into" distinction schematicizes a particular perspective or
point of view.  However, if the cognitive intent of the utterance is
simply to describe the vertical gradient of the path within the canyon,
there would be only one Ithkuil translation for both of these sentences,
eschewing the point of view entirely and restating the sentence to utilize
the holistic stem from which the complementary stems derive, in this case
a stem meaning 'OBLIQUELY VERTICAL GRADIENT/STEEPNESS' structured as

'marked path'-OBLIQUE 'canyon'-PROLATIVE 'oblique verticality'-6thDEGREE

This is loosely translatable in to English as something like "That path
running vertically through the canyon is steep."