Message-Id: <199602011753.TAA00620@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi>
Date:         Thu, 1 Feb 1996 13:10:27 -0500
Reply-To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
Subject:      Re: JVOPLACE.TXT part 1 of 2
To: Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
In-Reply-To:  <199602010024.TAA07419@universe.digex.net> from "Scott Brickner"
              at Jan 31, 96 06:24:39 pm
Content-Length: 2144
Lines: 43

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.