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Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 12:44:58 -0500
From: Jacob Thomas Errington <jake@mail.jerrington.me>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] Saying "How are you?"
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Hi,

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 04:08:12AM -0800, ketoemail@gmail.com wrote:
> I've been engaging in teaching myself Lojban at a rather young age.  However,
> after flipping through dictionaries, phrasebooks, and some beginner manuals,
> I can't seem to figure out how to prompt the question "How are you?" to
> someone.

Typically, one would say {.i do mo} which is an extremely open-ended question
in and of itself. It means something more along the lines of "What's up?"
rather than "How are you?".

Strictly speaking, {mo} is a placeholder relation. It syntactically behaves
like a word like {citka} or {limna}: it's a selbri.

There are a lot of other more specific questions you might want to ask, if {.i
do mo} is too general. For instance:

  - {.i ma nuzba (do)} "What's new (with you)?"
  - {.i do ma cinmo} "What are you feeling?" (Emotionally)

> The thing that really baffles me is the use of the word ma.  Since ma
> functions as who/what/when/where/how (to my knowledge), would it even be
> possible to differentiate between "How are you?" and "Who are you?"?

{ma} is a placeholder sumti (argument). In the two examples I gave above, it
says which part fo the relation I'm asking the question about.

Concretely, in {.i do ma cinmo} I'm asking the listener to tell me what sumti
should replace {ma}. A strict listener might answer {lo ka fengu} "Anger",
since this is a sumti, and it's what I asked for. A less strict listener might
just answer {.i mi fengu} "I'm angry", which doesn't exactly answer the
question since it's a complete sentence and not just a sumti.

Hope that helps!

.i mi'e la tsani mu'o

-- 
Jacob Thomas Errington
W: https://jerrington.me/

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