Re: [lojban] Re: Duty, promice etc...

[John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net>]

To sum up:
There does not yet seem to be a Lojban expression which refers to what English "promise" refers to
in "make/keep/break a promise?"  In particular, {lo se nupre} does not work (nor for any other
English use of "promise," for that matter).  On the other hand, all of the expressions that use
"promise" can be rendered without loss into Lojban, in expressions which usually do use {lo se
nupre}.  The same remarks apply to "obligation" and {lo se bilga} and presumably to most
expressions in this deontic area ("duty" was mentioned earlier as well).  I don't really think
that there is a lot of point -- now, any how -- finding a Lojban expression for these nominal uses
of "promise" since we can always say what is intended using a different idiom strategy and the
kinds of controversy such a search would involve are irrelevant to the Lojban project (so far as I
can see).