From jcowan@reutershealth.com Fri Dec 01 12:29:05 2000 Return-Path: X-Sender: jcowan@reutershealth.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@egroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-6_3_1_2); 1 Dec 2000 20:29:05 -0000 Received: (qmail 98266 invoked from network); 1 Dec 2000 20:28:41 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l7.egroups.com with QMQP; 1 Dec 2000 20:28:41 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta2 with SMTP; 1 Dec 2000 20:28:40 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@[192.168.3.11]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA25049; Fri, 1 Dec 2000 15:29:40 -0500 (EST) Sender: cowan@mail.reutershealth.com Message-ID: <3A2809C1.BCDD4566@reutershealth.com> Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2000 15:27:45 -0500 Organization: Reuters Health Information X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.16-22 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Ivan A Derzhanski Cc: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: zoi gy. Good Morning! .gy. References: <3A27DF96.F5D288A@math.bas.bg> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit From: John Cowan Ivan A Derzhanski wrote: > 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. True. > 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). Absolutely. > 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. This reminds me of my repeated observation that Russian-speakers here in the U.S. often respond to "How are you?" with a personal medical report. > 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. It's an interesting oddity that "Good night" is only a parting; the corresponding greeting has to be "Good evening" no matter how late it is. -- There is / one art || John Cowan no more / no less || http://www.reutershealth.com to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein