mal-

[cbmvax!uunet!mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU!nsn]

la .iVan. derjanskis. pu samcu'u
|>From: infmx!godzilla!cortesi@uunet.UU.NET (David Cortesi)
|:On 26 April, "Ivan Derzhanski" <uunet!chaos.cs.brandeis.edu!iad> said it:
|:> Second, to avoid being accused in malglicoism or malmerkoism, ...
|:On 30 april, mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU said it:
|:> ... These aren't tanru, these are malglico crudities...
|:And nobody called them on it.
|I didn't invent the word "malglico".  Neither did Nick.  I first saw it
|in an article posted by John Cowan on sci.lang.

And I'll bet John didn't invent it either. Have a look at the lessons,
recall Lojbab's essentially correct claim that "malglico" is one of the
first lojban terms a learner learns, and then see if I'm not right when
I say that every word A Certain Denizen Of Virginia is prescriptive, whether
The Denizen likes it or not %^)

I don't know if Lojbab will be as successful is establishing the semantics
of the mal- term as the morphology of it (after all, it's an obvious pattern,
and I've already used the terms malropno, and maldotco to describe Esperanto.
Someone give me an acceptable le'avla for Slav, and I'll complete the trio
(malrusko isn't quite accurate). Lojbab mentions {mabla} is Esperanto-
derived; but in Esperanto, {-acx}, which is Spanish I think, does not really 
correspond to "@#$%&" as Lojbab has put it, or even to "f*cking" (oops,
wherever are my manners); it's a somewhat mild disparagement, hardly taboo
breaking, and denotes bad quality rather than irritation. The prefix use
of {fi-}, expressing moral indignation, isn't much better. It remains to
be seen whether the Esperanto-speaking minority in Lojbanistan will be
sizeable enough to drag the connotation of mabla away from where English
speakers would have it.

|: Well, it didn't look right to me; I
|:didn't believe it was possible in Lojban to slap "mal" on the front of
|:something and make a pejorative out of it.
|Why not?  What other function could the gismu {mabla} serve?

Well geez, Ivan, it could be used as a selbri in itself. (May I parenthetically
congratulate Jim Carter for his analyses; he seems to know where it's at).
{ti malglico}, this is shit-english (to use an infrequent Australian 
construction), when rephrased into sumti (note how tanru analysis is a lot
easier for sumti than selbri), {ti du lo mabla glico}, flops out nicely
as {lo glico poi mabla}, it's-English and is-shitty. In fact, {do mabla}
is a nice and laconic insult. When will people learn that all gismu are
syntactically equal, and can be used at independent selbri rather than as
modifiers?

The place structure of {mabla}, like most of 'em, is quite vague. I'd
fill in the blanks of
"derogative connotation of ... used by... for..."
as {do mabla lo prenu mi do}, "You're a shit-version of a human, says I to U",
and
{ti mabla le glico tadji pe le jbobau mi le lojbo}: "This is the shit-version
of the anglo manner of lojban-speak, says I to the community".

|:  It's too latinate and/or esperantish.
|It is nothing of the sort.  The Latin root "mal" means `bad', but it can't
|just be slapped on the front of anything.  In Esp the prefix "mal" denotes
|negation (etymology mysterious), which is something entirely different.

Etymology is bad etymology by Zamenhof: it's the mal- in malheuresment.
Still, I can see where David sees the morphological, even if not semantic,
affinity.

|Not "culture".  Anything English can be called {glico}.

Speaking of prescribing, note how Ivan has picked up my convention of
bracketing {}, and elsewhere my term lojbani (I had in mind an Esperantish
distinction between Lojbani, a native, and Lojbanistani, a denizen). *This*
is how a language gets prescribed %^)

Nick is me. Who's Robert?