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

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 20:33:12 -0400

At 10:52 AM 10/25/2000 -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
>lojbab:
><<Because we are European language speakers and know our own language and
>culture. We *assume* we are biased towards European metaphors, so we
>eschew them.>>
>Guilty until proven innocent, with a guarantee that the latter proof
>will not be allowed to come forward -- since the form has already
>been rejected. Not a great plan and a long way from "let usage
>decide": it can't decide in favor of something we are forbidden to
>use.

No one forbids anything. Note that the list of lujvo I've asked people to 
give keywords to (and later place structures) consists of ALL the ones I 
found used in text, not just ones that someone likes. At this point I want 
all proposals to be treated equally, and make decisions about which to 
include in the dictionary later (based on usage or on other factors yet to 
be determined). Unfortunately, most people who are volunteering, instead 
of doing the relatively simple job of analyzing what we have now, are 
instead choosing to analyze concepts and try to find better words for those 
concepts. That is a legitimate exercise, and it might justifiably be 
slanted against non-literals, but it is hardly "usage" at all, much less 
usage in the quantity needed to "decide". What people actual use when they 
write about raccoons remains to be seen, (unless there is some prior usage 
I don't know about).

But even if we presumed that the bias affected usage to the extent of 
calling it "forbidding", malglico usages are mostly "forbidden" to native 
English speakers, not to speakers of other languages. It is really "using 
a non-literal metaphor from your native language for a concept that may not 
be restricted to your culture, and where the non-literal metaphor might 
suggest something quite different to another culture" that is discriminated 
against. We are especially hard on English because Lojban is dominated by 
English speakers and it is a justified fear that English-based metaphor 
meanings will creep in and tend to dominate and perhaps displace other 
meanings for the metaphor (good old "man-do" as a TLI Loglan example).

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org