Subject: Re: [lojban] RE:literalism

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 22:58:15 GMT

la pycyn cusku di'e

>the whole "mal-" line is borrowed from Esperanto
>(somewhat inaccurately -- Esperanto "mal-" is closer to Lojban
>"tol," but the most common form "malbona" seems to ahve set the
>pattern).

I think that the choice of the rafsi "mal" was indeed influenced
by Esperanto, and probably the gismu {mabla} was formed so that
it could have that rafsi. The usual line against Esperanto "mal-"
is that it supposedly makes people think of "bad", which is not
what it means (it corresponds to Lojban "tol" as you say). The
idea was that Lojban trumps Esperanto in this regard by having
"mal" actually have that bad connotation. That is my imagined
reconstruction from what I read, anyway.

But I doubt that the words {malglico} et al have anything to do
with Esperanto. They just reflect a (healthy) attitude against
relying too much on English idioms for Lojban, given that English
is (at least for now) the one common language of Lojbanists.

(As an aside, I think {malglico} is a badly formed lujvo,
it should be {glimabla}, but that's another thing, and probably
too late to do anything about it.)

>By the way, if by "metaphor" you mean
>something inaccurate, in what way is "skyscraper" one and
>"airplane" not?

Neither is a metaphor in English today, they are words
with well established meanings. The way I understand it,
a metaphor is the use of a word or phrase to refer by
analogy to something other than its ordinary meaning.
If I referred to a tree as a "skyscraper for birds"
then I would be using a metaphor, because trees are
not really skyscrapers. Very tall buildings are
skyscrapers, even if they don't really scrape the sky.

Using {tansraku} for "skyscraper" or {varplita} for
"airplane" in Lojban is, in my opinion, the wrong
way to go about it. If the words really acquired those
meanings they would not be metaphors anymore, but
they would be exotic compounds as seen from inside
Lojban.

Having said that, we have the additional problem that
the word "metaphor" is used in Lojban literature (as
are several other words) with a meaning only tangentially
related to its common meaning. For some reason I can't
understand, any tanru is called a metaphor in Lojban,
even if used with the most pedestrian literal meaning.

>Well, tanru don't need to be binary, except in the technical sense that 
>they will always be analyzed that way.

They do if we accept the gi'uste definition of tanru:

"x1 is a binary metaphor formed with x2 modifying x3,
giving meaning x4 in language x5."

The word "metaphor" in that definition is not to be taken
with its usual English meaning. It only means "tanru".
But the place structure practically forces it to be binary,
even if one or both of the components can themselves be
tanru.

co'o mi'e xorxes

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