[lojban-beginners] Re: Quick Reference Guide for language words

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On 10/28/07, Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:
>
> Many people have said that this is an improper use of the word
> "metaphor",

Indeed. Of the English phrases mentioned by JCB, only "intellectual
giant/dwarf" would qualify as a meaphor, all the others ("good mother",
"short man", "red house", etc) are not metaphoric.

> but no one has proposed a better English word or phrase.

That's not true. But in case you missed it before "phrasal predicate"
for example would be a better English phrase to describe {tanru}.
The current keyword "phrase compound" is better than "metaphor"
even though it doesn't really say that it is a predicate.

> Rather than leave the confusion of calling tanru "metaphors", which is
> how JCB always referred to them, we chose to assign a gismu-root word to
> refer to the specific Loglandic/Lojbanic concept, and abandon the use of
> the possibly confusing English word.

Except it wasn't completely abandoned, since it made it into the definition
of {tanru}. So the intended meaning of {tanru} does not in fact match its
official definition.

> In all of the cases where we
> started using Lojban words, the motivation was the same - to avoid the
> conflicting definitions of the corresponding English terminology.

Yes, but sometimes even more confusion was introduced, because the
words were used in English diffently than how they are defined as Lojban
words (e.g. "cmene" and "sumti" are not used for names and arguments
respectively, as the Lojban definition would dictate, but for a specific type
of names and for noun phrases in general whether used as arguments
or not).

mu'o mi'e xorxes