Date: Sun, 26 Oct 1997 10:06:32 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710261506.KAA25088@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: JORGE JOAQUIN LLAMBIAS Sender: Lojban list From: JORGE JOAQUIN LLAMBIAS Subject: Re: What's going on here? X-To: lojban To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1575 Lines: 39 > There's >nothing fundamentally different about the two forms of being; they're just >used linguistically for different cases. If a native Spanish-speaker feels >differently, speak now or forever hold your peace. :) Do you feel there's anything fundamentally different about the two forms of "hacer": "to do" and "to make"? Or are they just used linguistically for different cases? Different languages break up the continuum of possible meanings in different ways, that's all. co'o mi'e xorxes > >> In short, I speculate that Lojban does have the potential to expand one's >> mind, but it's not a magic pill that you take and suddenly become smarter; >> it will take years of work, and any benefits will be pretty subjective >> since we'll have learned something that almost by definition we won't be >> able to easily explain to the rest of society. > >In cases where a concept is especially difficult to express briefly in a >native language, we generally just borrow the word or phrase that >expresses it from the other language. It will be interesting to see if >there are any such Lojbanic phrases that anyone will find useful enough to >quote a lot, or eventually borrow and adapt. This process of >word-borrowing has been going on forever and English must be the king of >borrowing words. > >But in terms of actually making the distinction at all, you don't need a >language to do that, you just make the distinction. What a language can do >is find a convenient way of expressing that distinction to others. > >Geoff > >