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

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2000 19:27:50 +0200

The division commander unexpectedly stepped into the barracks.
A trembling orderly sprang to attention, and in a thin voice said:
`Good morning, sir.'

The division commander eyed the private for an age-long second.
And then he commented confidentially: `When I pass you in future
I want a salute, not an inaccurate weather report!'

----------
John Cowan wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Dec 2000, Ivan A Derzhanski wrote:
> > The concepts `young' and `old' are in fact scalar opposites.
> > What scale are `curse' and `bless' on?
> 
> Something like "x1 directs divine attention to x2, intended to have
> effect of degree N" where N varies from "highly positive effect"
> (blessing) to "highly negative effect" (curse).

I see. The odd thing is that the unmarked member of the pair
should be at the negative end of the opposition. In a natural
language it would be the positive end that would be unmarked.

> > Unlike Gandalf (and unlike Pycyn, it seems), I fail to see
> > how `good morning' can be thought of as anything other than
> > a mere formality. When was the last time you decided not
> > to say `good morning' to someone because [...] you thought
> > a good morning was not something you wanted to wish him?
> 
> The last time I passed a personal enemy.

Aha. So your `good morning' would be more accurately translated
as {coi.io} or {coi.iu}, or something like that. When you want
to show an attitude to your interlocutor in Lojban, you use an
attitudinal, not an inaccurate weather report (or a wish that
takes a waggonload of language-specific convention if it is to
be meaningful at all).

Btw, in Hungarian the greeting often has the form _jó reggelt kívánok_
`I wish a good morning', and even if _kívánok_ `I wish' is omitted,
_reggelt_ `morning' is still accusative. Contrariwise, in Russian
_dobroe utro_ can't be a wish, because then the case of the phrase
would have to be genitive, and it is actually nominative/accusative,
so the whole is a statement of fact if anything. How they go about
translating Gandalf's discourse into those languages I don't know.

> > There is a perfectly good Lojban expression to use in all those
> > situations in which English speakers say `good morning', namely
> > {coi}. What do you need another one for?
> 
> Well, Bilbo's final use of "Good morning!", which is perfectly
> idiomatic BTW, means more like "co'o".

Oh, yes. But translating that in the same way as the {coi} one
would be even more malglico than translating `good morning'
already is. Many languages have calqued the Western time-of-day
greetings, but considerably fewer use them as partings also.

--Ivan