From cowan Thu Feb 1 13:10:27 1996 Subject: Re: JVOPLACE.TXT part 1 of 2 From: John Cowan To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu (Lojban List) Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 13:10:27 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <199602010024.TAA07419@universe.digex.net> from "Scott Brickner" at Jan 31, 96 06:24:39 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2146 Message-ID: la skot. cusku di'e > I used the tanru {besna kafke} (brain cough, literally, though meant to > parallel the English slang "brain fart") as an observative. Don > insists that {kafke} should have been marked as "figurative", with > {pe'a}. I argue that since tanru are already metaphors, such marking > is redundant. I agree with Don, on the grounds given below. > For something to qualify as a "besna kafke", it's got to be a cough, > first of all. It's also got to have something meaningful in the k2 and > k3 places. Furthermore, there's got to be a brain out there (called > b1). For b1 to count as a brain in Lojban, it's got to have a body as > well (called b2). And finally, for k1 to be the x1 of "besna kafke", > as opposed of any old kind of "kafke", there's got to be some > relationship (called r) between some place of "kafke" and some place of > "besna". It doesn't matter which places, ... > > This seems to be the essence of Don's argument. A {besna} has no {te > kafke}, so a {besna kafke} can't be a "brain fart" because a brain fart > isn't a kind of {kafke}. Just so. Lojban tanru are not full-blast anything-goes metaphors, which is one of the reasons we now avoid the term "metaphor" in discussing them: they are essentially "verby" versions of the familiar noun-noun compounds for which English (and Chinese, and some other languages) are well-known. See ftp://powered.cs.yale.edu/pub/lojban/draft/refgrammar/plgs.txt. > I still think that, having moved into a metaphorical space, a {besna} > may make a {besna kafke} through a metaphorical {te kafke}: in the > particular instance where I used it, the metaphorical {te kafke} was my > lojban creating faculty (I used {xaksu} where I meant {pilno}, moving > too quickly from the gloss). I think it stretches the term "orifice" to call a mental faculty a "te kafke". Use "pe'a"; that's what it's for, marking true metaphors that match (or don't match) natural language forms like "brain fart" (note that a real fart is most definitely a "kafke"). -- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban.