Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: zoi gy. Good Morning! .gy.

From: Thimble Smith <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 17:36:54 -0500

On Thu, Nov 30, 2000 at 09:08:36PM +0000, David Scriven wrote:
> 
> As [email-masked] just pointed out to me, the English greeting 
> 'good morning" is actually extremely vague in terms of meaning and 
> intent, despite its relative uniformity as a convention. It can be 
> interpreted as a mere formality, or as an observation, or a wish, 
> or a blessing, etc. It is the vagueness of the expression that does 
> not translate well into lojban. So I suppose my original question 
> was contaminated by "malglico."

A tool that might help clarify thinking about this is the Ninio
and Wheeler taxonomy for communicative acts. The description I
have for it is in the book, _Pragmatic Development_, by Ninio
and Snow (ISBN 0-8133-2471-8). Anyway, they have a category of
speech acts, "Management of the transition between separation and
co-presence", with "Greet on meeting" meaning "To mark entering
into co-presence".

I know a culture where the standard greeting is "I de no?",
["Are you?"]. The response is, "Mi de, o" ["I am, uh-huh"].
Then the first person says, "I ko aki no?" ["You came here?"],
and the response is, "Mi ko aki". These phrases obviously aren't
literal questions and answers.

mi'e tim.