| In a message dated 7/19/2001 12:08:20 PM Central Daylight Time,
ragnarok@pobox.com writes: Lord Byron used the word love Maid of Athen ere we part, give Oh give me back my hear; or since that has left my breast, keep it now and take the rest. Hear my vow before I go, zoe mou sas agapo. Same verb. Byron, a hero of the Greek war for independence, knew a bit of Greek. <The greeks had three different roots which meant love> Had and still have three roots that we translate into English as "love" -- and a number of other things as well. <The eskimos actually speak aglutinative languages in which there can be as many words for snow as you want, but around five roots that meant snow - but these often referred to other things as well, as does English (powder might mean snow if encountered in a poem, for instance.) > Depends on how narrowly you define "Eskimo" : not all the Polar native languages are agglutinating, they have widely varying number of roots for snow of one sort and another, though none that has only one root regularly used in that way. <Eros was ALWAYS the sexual kind, for example, while philo was ALWAYS a more 'how you feel' kind. how you felt varied with philo; in plato and aristotle it was more like friendship than love> Pedophilia, not friendly though I suppose it could have something to do with how you feel (gently or roughly, say). For that matter, philarguria, the love of money, 1 Tim 6:10. Non-sexual eros is a tad harder to come up with since it does always seem to involve strong desires and the like -- quite inappropriate for philosophers, one supposes. But there is erasichrematos "covetous, avaricious" -- passionate, perhaps, but not sexual (certainly not preFreudianly) -- and a general sense of "to desire passionately" of things. Agape is even harder to pin down but seems to turn up in all the senses so far explored. I can't remember which one the Symposium is officially about. <I think having iu not mean mi prami is good, because it makes lojban the only language that does not need body language or smileys - the best English gloss for ui is not happiness but :-), which would never do in a formal paper. > There was no choice in the matter, since the two are from totally different language functions (pace xod) and every language has both, though the expressive is usually not so well-regulated as in Lojban. But generally, "Whee" is probably a little to enthusiastic for {ui}; I go with "yay!" when pressed. <Whatever happened to total unambiguity?> Never was any, never will be. No theory -- and certainly no practice -- allows it in language. And if you think the descriptive component has problems, imagine what happens in the emotive one, where there is not even a "common ground" against which to check things. |