Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: hardly

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2001 20:23:03

la aulun cusku di'e

> > I have been using {ja'aru'e} for this, and {naru'e} for "almost".
>
>I never could much appreciate the need/help of {ru'e}, as an
>attitudinal-emotional, in compounds with a bridi affirmer or
>negation.

I don't think {ru'e} should be confused with an emotion.
It attenuates the meaning of the preceding word, just as
{sai} intensifies it. It can be used with emotions but also
with other words.

>.i smaji ga'u ro cmana
>.i ne'i ro ricycpana
>caku seltirna
>fa ji'ino nunva'u
>.i lei ricyne'i cmacipni
>puzaku de'a grisa'a
>.i doido'u ko denpa le li'i
>ji'a do bazi sipna .i ba'a

Very nice! Do you really mean {li'i ji'a} or {do ji'a}?

>I tried to use {ji'ino} here (although referring to {no}, it doesn't
>seem to be "almost nothing" rather than something like +/- zero
>i.e. also covering negative values which isn't appropriate for normal
>speech).

I think it works well. Negative values are excluded because they
don't make sense as quantifiers.

>Will still have to think about it. Quantifiers can go with sumti (I
>hardly can see a house/I can see almost no house. I can hardly see/I
>can see next to nothing); but what's with selbri? (I could hardly
>sleep -> I had almost no sleep; this trick isn't always at hand).

There could be lots and lots of things that I can hardly see,
so "hardly see" is not the same as "see hardly anything".
We have different ways of doing the quantifier "hardly any",
but I think we have to use {ru'e} to say that the bridi
barely holds.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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