Postby janKipo » Sat Sep 21, 2019 10:36 am
As always, it depends on context. If yiu are asking a question that wants a time specificiation, then ‘tenpo seme?’ is just ritgh, either before or after the specification: “When will you come?” ‘tenpo seme la sina kama?’ or ‘sina kama lon tenpo seme?’. But if it is to cooordinate two events, “when” behaves like “if” and gives rise to a ‘la’ phrase: “I will come whe'n the sun rises” ‘suno li open sewi la mi kama’. Finally (well, there are lots of other cases, but these are the main ones) for a particular time specified by what happened then, you use ‘tenpo’ and a relative clause: I know when the movie starts”: ‘mi sona e tenpo ni: sitelen tawa li open lon ona’.