From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Sun Oct 28 09:14:28 2007 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Sun, 28 Oct 2007 09:14:28 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1ImAmR-0005dO-Et for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Sun, 28 Oct 2007 09:14:27 -0700 Received: from eastrmmtao104.cox.net ([68.230.240.46]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1ImAmO-0005d2-6d for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Sun, 28 Oct 2007 09:14:27 -0700 Received: from eastrmimpo02.cox.net ([68.1.16.120]) by eastrmmtao104.cox.net (InterMail vM.7.08.02.01 201-2186-121-102-20070209) with ESMTP id <20071028161415.YODR1395.eastrmmtao104.cox.net@eastrmimpo02.cox.net> for ; Sun, 28 Oct 2007 12:14:15 -0400 Received: from [127.0.0.1] ([72.192.234.183]) by eastrmimpo02.cox.net with bizsmtp id 5sE61Y0063y5FKc0000000; Sun, 28 Oct 2007 12:14:08 -0400 Message-ID: <4724B538.7070800@lojban.org> Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2007 12:13:44 -0400 From: Robert LeChevalier User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 (Windows/20050923) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Quick Reference Guide for language words References: <975a94850710270735t210f5212s8d39dd0003c08578@mail.gmail.com> <925d17560710270759i39867469o9ff60e75905c59c0@mail.gmail.com> <2204fa080710270924k2a9b6cbby3b2926a935773b9f@mail.gmail.com> <975a94850710271658m5bdfbb23y7a0c7b271ad5acba@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <975a94850710271658m5bdfbb23y7a0c7b271ad5acba@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Score: 0.0 X-Spam-Score-Int: 0 X-Spam-Bar: / X-archive-position: 5722 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: lojbab@lojban.org Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners Joel Shellman wrote: >>tanru: metaphoric modifier-phrase > > > interesting, how is it metaphoric? Language inventor JCB coined the phrase "binary metaphor" to describe what is happening in a tanru. tanru are always interpreted as consisting of 2 parts, which we can call a modifier and a modificand. The exact relationship between the modifier and the modificand is indeterminate and often figurative Here are JCB's specific words on the topic: http://www.loglan.org/Loglan1/chap3.html#sec3.11 > But we must now inquire more closely into the meaning of such > phrases. If X is a short man, does this mean that he is short and a > man? Not necessarily; for he might be fairly tall...for a woman, say, > or a child. All we can surmise is that he is short for a man; that > is, a short type of man. What about blue houses? And beautiful > swimmers? Can we expect them to be really blue? And really beautiful? > All over? Inside and out? Certainly not; for blue houses and > beautiful swimmers, like short men, are blue for houses and beautiful > as swimmers. That is, they are blue among houses and not among skies, > and it is their swimming that is beautiful, never mind their eyes. > And good mothers? Good as mothers, perhaps, but not necessarily good > cooks or good wives. And so on.22 > > Clearly we are dealing here with metaphorical extensions of primitive > ideas. We know what a mother is, and a man and a house. And we know > what good, blue, beautiful and short mean, as primitive ideas. The > first time we hear the metaphor 'good mother' we are in a fair > position to guess what the speaker means, from our knowledge of the > uses of these simple predicates in the language. But we cannot be > sure. Neither--until one has seen one--can one be sure what a blue > house is. How blue does a house have to be to be blue? How short is a > short man? More puzzlingly, how watery is a water-pistol? How > intellectual is an intellectual dwarf? And what is a bicycle pump > anyway? Does it pump bicycles? Into what? > > In Loglan we surmise, with most logicians, that such questions are > unanswerable by direct analysis. We suppose that the meanings of > predicate expressions formed of two or more constituent predicate > ideas are like the meanings of simple predicates themselves: > essentially unitary and unanalyzable.23 A blue house is...well, a > blue house. Like houses themselves, or blue things, you have to be > shown one to really know. And intellectual dwarfs? Well, here again > it is not the art of logical inference, but a sense of irony that > helps one to understand this phrase; that and having heard the phrase > 'intellectual giant', with which it strongly contrasts. And bicycle > pumps? Again, the knowledge that bicycles have pneumatic tires might > help the auditor guess what this metaphor means; and so on. But we > are doing more than arguing for the utility of use and custom in > understanding such phrases; we should also insist that all such > modifier-modified pairs are metaphors, the humblest as well as the > most exotic and obscure. And that the original occasions of their use > represented, at those moments, the extension of the semantic > machinery of the language into regions then unknown. Red houses and > short men are commonplace, now. But we suppose they were not once. > Water pistols are now commonplace. But we know they were not before > someone invented and then named that innocent, modern contrivance. > Star-sailors are not commonplace; but the word 'astronaut' is and > they may be. So language grows. New predicates arise. And we suppose > that the first step in that process is the coining of fresh metaphor, > and that this always involves the "misuse" of some old word.24 Many people have said that this is an improper use of the word "metaphor", but no one has proposed a better English word or phrase. Rather than leave the confusion of calling tanru "metaphors", which is how JCB always referred to them, we chose to assign a gismu-root word to refer to the specific Loglandic/Lojbanic concept, and abandon the use of the possibly confusing English word. In all of the cases where we started using Lojban words, the motivation was the same - to avoid the conflicting definitions of the corresponding English terminology. lojbab