Parenting (was: Insult)

Sally Caves scripsit:

> Ailly!  What if you don't have a word in your language for "parent"?  Just
> "mother" or "father"?  In Teonaht, "parents" in the plural is "nippanand,"
> your "momdads."  How utterly hetero of the Teonim.  I suppose you could say:
>
> Fretyn fyl nippanand!  ("Brothers (are/were) your momdads!")
That sounds very good to me.  The Lojban version literally says
"A progenitor of you is the brother of the co-progenitor of you".
Perhaps to really sharpen the point I should have avoided "brother",
which is allowed to have a figurative sense, and said: da de poi nakni
vau di poi nakni zo'u da rorci de .ije da rorci di .ije de rorci do di",
which is literally "There is an X, and a Y who is male, and a Z who is
male, such that X begets/bears Y, and X begets/bears Z, and X begets/bears
you with bearer/begetter Z."

Lojban has five parent-type words:  mamta (mother), which can be
figurative or not; and patfu (father) ditto; and rorci (genetic parent);
and seljbe (birthmother, womb mother); and rirni (the one who rears you,
de facto parent, adoptive parent).

So all of these are true of me and my daughter Irene:

        la djan. patfu la .airin.  la djan. na mamta la .airin.
        la djan. na rorci la .airin.  la djan. na seljbe la .airin.
        la djan. rirni la .airin.

And Rosta, I think, spontaneously emitted a true Lojbanism when he
described himself as "sralo selmamta", which means "is Australian-ly
be-mothered".

--
In politics, obedience and support      John Cowan <jcowan@...>
are the same thing.  --Hannah Arendt    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

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