Saying "How are you?"

[keto...@gmail.com]

Hello all!

I've been engaging in teaching myself Lojban at a rather young age. However, after flipping through dictionaries, phrasebooks, and some beginner manuals, I can't seem to figure out how to prompt the question "How are you?" to someone.

The thing that really baffles me is the use of the word ma. Since ma functions as who/what/when/where/how (to my knowledge), would it even be possible to differentiate between "How are you?" and "Who are you?"?

Thank you for your help!

[Jacob Thomas Errington]

Hi,

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 04:08:12AM -0800, keto...@gmail.com wrote:
> I've been engaging in teaching myself Lojban at a rather young age. However,
> after flipping through dictionaries, phrasebooks, and some beginner manuals,
> I can't seem to figure out how to prompt the question "How are you?" to
> someone.

Typically, one would say {.i do mo} which is an extremely open-ended question
in and of itself. It means something more along the lines of "What's up?"
rather than "How are you?".

Strictly speaking, {mo} is a placeholder relation. It syntactically behaves
like a word like {citka} or {limna}: it's a selbri.

There are a lot of other more specific questions you might want to ask, if {.i
do mo} is too general. For instance:

- {.i ma nuzba (do)} "What's new (with you)?"
- {.i do ma cinmo} "What are you feeling?" (Emotionally)

> The thing that really baffles me is the use of the word ma. Since ma
> functions as who/what/when/where/how (to my knowledge), would it even be
> possible to differentiate between "How are you?" and "Who are you?"?

{ma} is a placeholder sumti (argument). In the two examples I gave above, it
says which part fo the relation I'm asking the question about.

Concretely, in {.i do ma cinmo} I'm asking the listener to tell me what sumti
should replace {ma}. A strict listener might answer {lo ka fengu} "Anger",
since this is a sumti, and it's what I asked for. A less strict listener might
just answer {.i mi fengu} "I'm angry", which doesn't exactly answer the
question since it's a complete sentence and not just a sumti.

Hope that helps!

.i mi'e la tsani mu'o

--
Jacob Thomas Errington
W: https://jerrington.me/