Re: daily terms

["Mark E. Shoulson" <shoulson@CS.COLUMBIA.EDU>]

>Date:         Fri, 21 Feb 1997 17:48:19 -0600
>From: Steven Belknap <sbelknap@UIC.EDU>
>
>If one were to specifically wish you good morning, (that is, to explicitly
>refer to morning), would it be correct to say:
>
>a'o leti cerni cu xamgu do

Hrm.  Is "xamgu" really the right word?  I think it's more like "fitting"
or "meet".  A fruit can be "good for eating" or something, but somehow that
seems not quite right for mornings.  I suppose a morning can be good for
you, for the purposes of your enjoyment or something, but somehow it still
seems sterile.  Maybe zabna?  pluka probably better still.

>(gloss: Let there be hope that this-here morning is good for you.)

"le vi cerni", right?  Even that isn't right, since "vi" is spatial; you
mean "le ca cerni", right?

>Of course, to some extent such greetings are fuzzily idiomatic, and

Yeah.  Who's to say that "good morning" really has anything to do with "may
this morning be good"?  It's more like "Hey there, I'm greeting you in a
polite way, and it happens to be morning around here."

~mark