As for its other, more common English meaning—is there an already existing valsi for "jerk" or "bad person"?
The American Heritage dictionary says it means "an irritating or contemptible person". I think that all of these English phrases describe a more general concept than "selfish" or "bad": "bad/ irritating/mean/malicious/selfish/contemptible" plus "person".
On 10 July 2009, at 1:41 PM, MorphemeAddict@wmconnect.com wrote:
In a message dated 7/10/2009 15:49:54 Eastern Daylight Time, mungojelly@gmail.com writes:On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Luke Bergen<lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:>> As a side note, how would one say "asshole" in lojban? It seems like a word > that has a lot of cultural bias in it. But how would one express that > concept of "that person is a _____" where "_____" has a whole lot of > connotations about selfishness etc... that we in english have decided to> shorten into "asshole"? You can make all sorts of colorful "mal-" lujvo that could have any sort of connotations, but if you want to bring through the same connotations as an English word the appropriate way to do it is probably with a fu'ivla. Perhaps "mablrxasxolo"?My approach would be to paraphrase it literally, avoiding the English word/metaphor completely, and go just for the meaning. Then try to find or construct a Lojban equivalent that wasn't too long. It's all the connotations that might be a problem. Or you could come up with a basic word for "selfish" (or whatever you determine to be the basic meaning of the word) and then embellish as necessary.How do you say "selfish" in Lojban? It doesn't seem to be a gismu or simple cmavo.stevo