Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: RE:literalism

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 20:41:38 +0300

"Alfred W. Tueting (Tüting)" wrote:
> BTW, just want to add that some peoples prefer kind of fu'ivla,
> like the Maltese:
> 
> skajskrejper - xorta ta' bini gholi hafna [...]
> kind of very high building :-(

Ah, but that's Maltese! Maltese regards the vocabulary of English
almost as if it were its own.

> How do the Arabs, Turks etc. handle this metaphor?
> (gökdelen/gökdeldi? something with sky=gök)

`sky-piercer' (better than `skyscraper', if you ask me).
But in Persian one says `sky-scraper', <AsmAn-xarA^s>.

> Although pretty new to Lojban, I'm fighting on pycyn's side with
> all my heart: total refrain from coining metaphoric tanru/lujvo
> and sticking to literalism means death (better: abortion) or - in
> the best case - self-castration to Lojban!
[...]
> My prophecy: Follow this way (of strict & constructivistic
> literalism) and Lojban will be a dead languages before ever
> having been born! There will be nothing left to "rejoice" about.

Otoh, if Lojban survives at the cost of no longer being itself and
instead becoming a code for <insert the name of any natlang here>,
there will be just as little left to rejoice about.

I'm willing to accept the argument that literal, transparent
compounding has its limitations, and that at some point one
does have to resort to metaphor. I am, however, in favour
of keeping metaphor as a last-resort technique.

Since the `sky scraping' metaphor is very widespread, its
carrying over to Lojban would appear less scandalous than
some other `naturalisms' do, but what does it do that
{tcergaldi'u} or {galgaldi'u} do not?

--Ivan