Subject: Re: [lojban] "boring"

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 09:46:29 EDT

In a message dated 9/6/2002 11:12:47 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
> How to express (with an attitudinal) that something is boring? I would have
> expected something like "opposite of interesting".
> 
> .a'u is "interest" but .a'unai is glossed as "repulsion"... could I also 
> use
> it for "this is boring"? As in {.a'unai le veltivni cu spofu}?
>>
Good question! It looks as though "interest" here (key words are not our 
friends) means something like "attraction," which is certainly one sense of 
"interest," though not the first to come to mind as an emotion. "boring," in 
particular, lies in another direction, without the evaluative component (we 
can be bored with attractive ideas -- or their expressions --as much as with 
unattractive ones). Probably there is something to be worked out with the 
dimensional emotive system, but no one uses it or can decode it on the fly 
(and often not with the book in front of them), so that probably wont help 
for "booooooring"
{a'a} won't help, since its neutral position covers daydreaming better than 
being bored -- for which one has to be at least somewhat attentive.
Maybe a combination of {ueru'e} and {u'inai}?

<<
And as for the adjective -- tolci'i? tolzdi?
Both seem to work, though for slightly different notions, obviously. But 
they fit in nicely with the suggested attitudinals. Probably {malslabu} 
works for another sense.