Грамматика ложбана/13.6

Система междометий ложбана разрабатывалась путём анализа длинного списка английских слов, выражающих чувства и эмоции. В этом списке было куда больше слов, чтобы уместиться в 39 cmavo, доступных в форме VV. Чтобы сделать количество cmavo ограниченным, эти слова, выражающие чувства и эмоции, были сгруппированы по общим признакам: каждой группе было назначено своё cmavo. Это можно уподобить составлению tanru наоборот, в результате чего мы получаем коллекцию индикаторов, которые можно группировать подобно tanru, чтобы выражать очень сложные чувства и эмоции. Давайте разберём конкретные примеры.

Наиболее важная общая черта, которую обнаружили, разбивает список эмоций на 6 основных групп, для каждой из которых ыло назначено своё cmavo:

      ro'a    общественный     асоциальный      антиобщественный
      ro'e    умственный                        анти-интеллектуальный
      ro'i    эмоциональный                     отрицание эмоций
      ro'o    фищический аспект                 отрицание физического аспекта
      ro'u    половой/сексуальный аспект        половое воздержание
      re'e    духовный         светский         святотатственный

Using these, we were able to assign “o'u” to mark a scale of what we might call “generalized comfort”. When you are comfortable, relaxed, satisfied, you express comfort with “o'u”, possibly followed by a scale indicator to indicate how comfortable you are. The six cmavo given above allow you to turn this scale into six separate ones, should you wish.

For example, embarrassment is a social discomfort, expressible as “.o'unairo'a”. Some emotions that we label “stress” in English are expressed in Lojban with “.o'unairo'i”. Physical distress can be expressed with “.o'unairo'o”, which makes a nice groan if you say it with feeling. Mental discomfort might be what you feel when you don’t know the answer to the test question, but feel that you should. Most adults can recall some instance where we felt sexual discomfort, “o'unairo'u”. Spiritual discomfort, “o'unaire'e”, might be felt by a church-goer who has wandered into the wrong kind of religious building.

Most of the time when expressing an emotion, you won’t categorize it with these words. Emotional expressions should be quickly expressible without having to think about them. However, we sometimes have mixed emotions within this set, as for example emotional discomfort coupled with physical comfort or vice versa.

Coupling these six words with our 39 attitude scales, each of which has a positive and negative side, already gives you far more emotional expression words than we have emotional labels in English. Thus, you’ll never see a Lojban-English emotional dictionary that covers all the Lojban possibilities. Some may be useless, but others convey emotions that probably never had a word for them before, though many have felt them (“.eiro'u”, for example — look it up).

You can use scale markers and “nai” on these six category words, and you can also use category words without specifying the emotion. Thus, “I’m trying to concentrate” could be expressed simply as “ro'e”, and if you are feeling anti-social in some non-specific way, “ro'anai” will express it.

There is a mnemonic device for the six emotion categories, based on moving your arms about. In the following table, your hands begin above your head and move down your body in sequence.

      ro'a    hands above head       social
      ro'e    hands on head          intellectual
      ro'i    hands on heart         emotional
      ro'o    hands on belly         physical
      ro'u    hands on groin         sexual
      re'e    hands moving around    spiritual

The implicit metaphors “heart” for emotional and “belly” for physical are not really Lojbanic, but they work fine for English-speakers.