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Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 23:46:57 -0400 (EDT)
From: Alexander Kozhevnikov <alexkoz@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Speaker specificity: {.i da'i na vajni}
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I just wanted to quickly butt in and voice disagreement with this example:

On Tue, 30 Sep 2014, Dustin Lacewell wrote:
> I'm putting this here because I was asked to do so (probably for
> completeness in discourse)
> The example I habitually provide is, imagine some men are hanging out by a
> water-cooler and some women walking past hear them making sexist remarks.
> One women isn't going to confuse the other by saying something like "Those
> dogs are disgusting". Does the listener really require such a
> front-and-center indication of non-veridicality? As far as I'm concerned
> the answer is blaring "no".

I think the answer is a clear 'yes' if you are going to effectively 
communicate with speakers who are not familiar to your culture's 
metaphors, whether that be primitive AI, hypothetical aliens, or just 
people from a culture a few countries away where "dogs" is not a metaphor 
for intellectually-primitive-human-males.

I think overall, having an efficient way to say what you really mean is a 
good thing, and in this case, that means having an ability to specify in 
a concise manner that something is or isn't metaphorical.

Having that means the more literal-minded, or those who struggle with 
metaphorical speech, such as many autistic individuals for example, can be 
readily cued in to what you are implying. It means children (and more 
generally though less commonly mentally mature people as well) will be 
less likely to pick up mis-conceptions when delving into a new topic - 
because sure comparing people to animals is conceptually a fairly 
widespread metaphor in its various permutations - but when you get into 
less typical/casual matters it's no longer that easy.

The inability to distinguish between the literal and metaphorical quickly 
will also manifest when you have a situation with both literal and 
metaphorical instances of the thing involved. The above example becomes 
insta-ambiguous if you also add in a couple of actual dogs doing something 
disgusting, or appearing disgusting. Of course in your example that 
doesn't strike me as a likely problem, but I think it's easy enough to run 
into cases like that in practice.

I think we also overlook another value of the ability to be explicitly 
metaphorical: it enables one to readily introduce new metaphors which 
otherwise would require more load on the other parties in the conversation 
to figure out. This is a generalization of my first point about speakers 
who don't know the metaphor being deployed - except instead of limiting 
our consideration to metaphors regularly used in one culture being 
misunderstood by others, consider how much easier it is to throw a truly 
novel metaphor into a conversation - trying this in English has often 
generated uncomprehending looks when I've tried it, because I guess some 
people just aren't good at recognizing metaphors they aren't familiar with 
on the fly. I think we can have more creative and expressive uses of 
language if we can readily differentiate the literal meaning from 
non-literal.

Personally, one of the points which currently draw me to Lojban is it's 
claimed ability to allow unambiguous communication efficiently. I 
want a one-or-two syllable way to draw the distinction between me 
being literal and not. (Though I don't have enough lojban knowledge yet to 
particularly care whether le/lo have anything to do with making this 
distinction.)

Or maybe I missed the whole point of this "veridicality" discussion, in 
which case apologies for me wasting the time you all had to spend to read 
this.

mu'o mi'e .aleksandr.kojevnikov. do'u

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