Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: looking at arjlujv.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 21:58:47 EDT

Oh, goody! a philosophic dispute again. Of course, gismu are literal, as are 
indeed lujvo and tanru. The question is just what that literal meaning is, 
especially for tanru and lujvo -- that is, how is the literal meaning of the 
compound related to the literal meaning of the components. Literalism tends 
to think in terms of a very small number of possibilities and then to object 
if a case does not fit any of those possibilities or even if another word 
fits those possibilities better. The latter is really obnoxious, if the 
given word works at all, the former restricts the possibilities to the most 
restrictive sense of "logical" (somewhat less than even Aristotle would have 
allowed). The Loglan tradition has never stood for either of these and has 
almost always been (in program, if not in execution) for creative 
constructions. For one thing, definitions are almost always too long to be 
useful and anything short of a definition is, by definition, merely a 
metaphor anyhow -- so we might as well have beautiful ones as ugly. And most 
ugly ones come about -- not strange to say
-- in the belief that they are being "accurate / literal / definitional." 
there is, of course, the possibility of misunderstanding in all of this, but 
that is inherent in the tanru and lujvo processes (else why have the handy 
cmavo for explaining, in ever increasing detail -- we can never be perfectly 
sure to eliminate all possible misunderstandings -- what we meant?). Since 
the lujvo space is full of examples that are not very clear (see the 
discussion of one attempt -- largely guesswork -- to figure some out), I 
can't give good examples from recent times. Probably one of the prides of 
the old days, however, was "blade hammer" for "hatchet, ax". It can't be 
gotten to by any of the mechanical rules for tanru/lujvo construction (or, at 
least, couldn't then -- we may have incorporated it since), but, once got, it 
is unforgettable and wonderfully right. I have seen quite a few good ones 
since, though I can't pull them up now (I can't even remember which of the 
half dozen Loglans they were in), but they all had similar qualities, "ahah!" 
Not every lujvo or tanru needs to be that good, but don't ding them for 
trying and don't try to fit them into preconceived molds, especially if they 
do a good job outside them.