Re: [lojban-beginners] How to say "should" in Lojban

[Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 8:49 AM, Zifre <kmicklas@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> nitcu, bilga, and sarcu are all similar, but they don't seem to have
> quite the same connotations as the English words "should" or
> "ought".

You shouldn't expect to ever find any words with the same connotations
as English words!  In the early history of all of these words, many of
them naturally attempted to gravitate towards acquiring meanings very
similar to meanings in English, since nearly every speaker of Lojban
was an American and the words were even given English keywords (which
was later much lamented).  A strong culture then developed of
resisting that tendency for gismu to become English-like.  The word
"malglico" (now sometimes said "malgli"), which means English-related
but is also a swear, was developed and used constantly.  We worked
hard to give distinct connotations to the gismu that don't resemble
anything in English.

So you'll have to learn some slightly different ideas, and be creative
in how you express things.  Look far past the keywords, for instance
look into the later places of words to see how you can use them in
unexpected ways.  I agree with the suggestions other people made in
this thread, in particular I first thought myself of ".ei" or "xamgu".
 You wouldn't think of "xamgu" for this use if you just know it as
meaning "good".  It's even still odd for this if you think of the
slightly more accurate translation "x1 is beneficial to x2".  It would
be odd to say in English "Going to the market would be beneficial to
me!"  But it could be a very natural translation to say in Lojban "lo
nu mi klama le zarci cu xamgu da'i mi".

mi'e .telselkik. mu'o

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