From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Wed Oct 29 10:00:31 2008 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:00:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1KvEPG-0004Cj-TO for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:00:31 -0700 Received: from hs-out-0708.google.com ([64.233.178.244]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1KvEP8-0004C9-Sd for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:00:30 -0700 Received: by hs-out-0708.google.com with SMTP id k27so36195hsc.2 for ; Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:00:21 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=domainkey-signature:received:received:message-id:date:from:to :subject:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type :content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; bh=vOck3bdi5qutIC+EDXUz46YxxI8NPHn5ohcqw19qmcU=; b=xx0sm+HQxbjk/OQIdgK4WKI9MhBmHjrBOo+XNY6bo9T0Ir7m0MIcuwjeoA7gYLsGTS HiOGcDqi/2OEnAW2dn+PJ0nkSKFyt2ZSUfC3RIDmOs9742AX++GxL6450x/mf51ngRzR x3qhMhCNumtxKeLr36TOjsQshOw/aU/05hGkI= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=message-id:date:from:to:subject:in-reply-to:mime-version :content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition :references; b=HhRdCDylMiQf6yx83oVPs0g4AWC6qyahNGriVj33lsuOnwgUwYBQUb6HmLcN4Cvqzb UgRDbETIlL2D6U4Q42gV+FmolePBwtjyqFXHlVtqLDqSwAVMNYJhgcJZoZzXJ+75hn36 MAA/yrWPKSyoph07i7RydbSEGgAL8gaJzxMiA= Received: by 10.143.1.12 with SMTP id d12mr4111976wfi.297.1225299621206; Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:00:21 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.142.223.9 with HTTP; Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:00:21 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <975a94850810291000m2ae88a3ek99892e86287b6295@mail.gmail.com> Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:00:21 -0700 From: JS To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: "I gotta go feed my baby turtles" In-Reply-To: <4de8c3930810290937q7d6436daw557a7dc8ce386e8a@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <4de8c3930810290937q7d6436daw557a7dc8ce386e8a@mail.gmail.com> X-Spam-Score: -0.0 X-Spam-Score-Int: 0 X-Spam-Bar: / X-archive-position: 954 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: jshellman@gmail.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 9:37 AM, tijlan wrote: > Do we have any workaround to retain as much humor in Lojban as in > English in terms of ambiguity? My take on this thing: You cannot "remove" humor, metaphor, ambiguity, etc., from the *use* of a language. Because that has nothing to do with the language, rather it comes from culture. Sure, people might not wax punny with lojban (which I'm not sure bothers me :) but there will be wordplay, because that comes from people and their experiences and not from the language. I see a tree and say "look, a horse!" because of a shared joke with my wife. Similarly, shared humorous cultural experiences can be communicated in any language. Wordplay might be more sophisticated, require more thought, obscure, or shallow... hard to say. But people will play--if not, it's a dead language. Heh, perhaps that's an interesting measure of the life of a language, how much people "play" with it. A simple example, what if one puts a word in x1 when it really belongs in x2. In certain situations, that could be rather funny, and the listener will "get it" because of context/culture. I was looking up the definition of mercy the other day. As I was thinking about it later, I was kind of disappointed at some of the definitions that were listed. They had listed some definitions that were not denotations of the word at all, but rather were common metaphorical uses of the word. I didn't like it--because it both muddies the water and almost restricts proliferation of metaphors by somehow canonicalizing a few popular ones.