Message-Id: <199512132350.BAA26252@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi>
Date:         Wed, 13 Dec 1995 15:28:03 -0600
Reply-To: "Steven M. Belknap" <sbelknap@UIC.EDU>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: "Steven M. Belknap" <sbelknap@UIC.EDU>
Subject:      metaphors
To: Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
Content-Length: 3279
Lines: 72

mi cusku dihe
>> "Road to Babylon" is a literary reference type metaphor, which assumes that
>> the speaker and listener have a common biblical referent. Babylon was an
>> actual city, and actual roads led to it. <litru> is more general than
>> <dargu> and <tadji> is more general than <litru>. <Dargu> seems like the
>> best fit when translating the idea of a "road"; <klaji> for example would
>> not be right, because it does not carry the sense of "road-route". Using
>> <tadji> as you propose obscures the metaphor.
>
la dn cusku dihe

>There appears to be curious miscommunication here.  I took your lojban to mean
>"the road to Bable".  "Bable" not being a place, but the state of a
>multiplicity of languages.  To reach a state does not require a "road", but
>a method.  I think that the metaphor would be better served by "pluta" which is
>a bare route, "dargu" has the connotation of being an improved-surface which is
>travelled upon.
>
>    .i ti pluta pa'e la bebl.
>
Agree with <pluta> for two reasons. 1. A difficult, painful
pothole-obstructed journey upon a twisting goat-path ending in disaster is
exactly the sense I mean! 2. The Babylonians had much worse roads than the
Romans.

But shouldn't the <pahe> apply to the entire meme, "road to Babylon"? There
is another problem with my metaphor. If you think about it, the mythical
tower of Babel could not have been in the city of Babylon, because, as you
may recall, the language difficulties resulted in the failure to complete
the city they were building! However the mythical towel of babel may have
been based on a real tower. Here is the EB on Babel:


Babel, Tower of:  in biblical literature, structure built in the land of
Shinar (Babylonia) some time after the Deluge. The story of its
construction, given in  Genesis 11:1-9, appears to be an attempt to explain
the existence of diverse human languages. According to Genesis, the
Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty city
and a tower "with its top in the heavens."
God disrupted the work by so confusing the language of the workers that
they could no longer understand one another. The city was never completed,
and the people were dispersed over the face of the earth. The myth may have
been inspired by the Babylonian tower temple north of the Marduk temple,
which in Babylonian was called Bab-ilu ("Gate of God"), Hebrew form Babel,
or Bavel. The similarity in pronunciation of Babel and balal ("to confuse")
led to the play on words in Genesis 11:9: "Therefore its name was called
Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth."

So what I want is "the (planned) city of Babel", that is the planned (but
uncompleted) city where the tower of Babel was built (I don't know the name
of the city, and if I did referring to it by name would obscure the
metaphor)


.i peha ti pluta le tcadu vi la bebl

This is too clumsy. (And I probably don't have the <vi> right. It probably
needs some kind of combining form. For the metaphor, simple is better.

.i peha ti pluta la bebl


cohomihe la stivn


Steven M. Belknap, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Medicine
University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria

email: sbelknap@uic.edu
Voice: 309/671-3403
Fax:   309/671-8413