[lojban-beginners] Re: "I gotta go feed my baby turtles"

[JS <jshellman@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 9:37 AM, tijlan <picos.picos@gmail.com> wrote:
> Do we have any workaround to retain as much humor in Lojban as in
> English in terms of ambiguity?

My take on this thing:

You cannot "remove" humor, metaphor, ambiguity, etc., from the *use*
of a language. Because that has nothing to do with the language,
rather it comes from culture. Sure, people might not wax punny with
lojban (which I'm not sure bothers me :) but there will be wordplay,
because that comes from people and their experiences and not from the
language. I see a tree and say "look, a horse!" because of a
shared joke with my wife. Similarly, shared humorous cultural
experiences can be communicated in any language.

Wordplay might be more sophisticated, require more thought, obscure,
or shallow... hard to say. But people will play--if not, it's a dead
language. Heh, perhaps that's an interesting measure of the life of a
language, how much people "play" with it.

A simple example, what if one puts a word in x1 when it really belongs
in x2. In certain situations, that could be rather funny, and the
listener will "get it" because of context/culture.

I was looking up the definition of mercy the other day. As I was
thinking about it later, I was kind of disappointed at some of the
definitions that were listed. They had listed some definitions that
were not denotations of the word at all, but rather were common
metaphorical uses of the word. I didn't like it--because it both
muddies the water and almost restricts proliferation of metaphors by
somehow canonicalizing a few popular ones.