Re: [lojban] babies: "you might as well sleep"

[tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com>]

On 6 November 2011 05:36, Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 05, 2011 at 11:05:58AM -0300, Jorge Llambías wrote:
>> On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Robin Lee Powell
>> <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
>> > On Fri, Nov 04, 2011 at 10:37:29AM -0300, Jorge Llambías wrote:
>> >>
>> >> "might as well" means "have no reason not to", so you could say
>> >> ".ei no da fanta lo nu do sipna".
>> >
>> > What's the {.ei} there for?
>>
>> Just to make it a little less presumptuous: "there ought to be
>> nothing preventing you from sleeping" instead of a plain "nothing
>> prevents you from sleeping". You could leave it out too.
>
> Huh.  That's not what I think {.ei} means at all.  I read that as
> "I, the speaker, am feeling obligated/constrained about something
> having to do with nothing preventing you from sleeping".  I don't
> get your use there at all.

The personal feeling that there is an obligation can be independent of
how the goal is to be achieved. For example, I could be feeling that a
broken public bridge in my town ought to be repaired but not that the
repairer ought to be me myself. {.ei cikre lo cripu} wouldn't
necessarily mean that the speaker is feeling personally obligated to
do anything for the bridge any more than that {cikre lo cripu} just
ought to be brought about by whatever agent.

On another note:
"constraint" is the gloss for {.e'i}, so we might as well (!) avoid
using its relatives like "constrained" in translating the sense of
{.ei}.

mu'o

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