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RE: [lojban] By the way < tangent?
But tangent as in a tangent line is very different from tangent as in
sin/cos. That's what the gismu is, and has nothing to do with ta'o.
-----Original Message-----
From: Steven Belknap [mailto:sbelknap@UIC.EDU]
Sent: Monday, January 20, 2003 12:42 PM
To: Robert LeChevalier
Cc: lojban@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] By the way < tangent?
I am skeptical about this being malglico. One has to have *some*
metaphor, and any particular metaphor is likely to be closer to some
culture's existing than another's. I rather like the idea of building
lojban combining and combination words from gismu which exist in *no*
existing culture but which do suggest the meaning in a clear way. Doing
this creates "strangeness" but preserves "meaningfulness". Not always
possible though. The idea of tangentiality is an extrapolation from
geometry. That is culturally neutral enough for me, despite the alleged
malglico of the English referent.
On Sunday, January 19, 2003, at 11:09 PM, Robert LeChevalier wrote:
> At 10:22 PM 1/19/03 -0600, Steven Belknap wrote:
>> consider the English word "tangentially"
>>
>> On Sunday, January 19, 2003, at 10:03 PM, Pierre Abbat wrote:
>>
>>> Chapter 13 lists the cmavo {ta'o} "by the way" as coming from
>>> {tanjo},
>>> which
>>> is the word for a trigonometric function (li pa tanjo lo julra'o be
>>> li
>>> vomu).
>>> What's the connection? Also, is {zu'u} derived from {zunle}?
>
> The cmavo do sometimes come from malglico sound-alikes. It was at the
> time
> a memory hook for the all-English speakers learning the language, with
> the
> malglicoism (the one Steven suggests was indeed what we had in mind) so
> obvious that I wasn't afraid that people would think that ta'o had to
> do
> with trig functions. The alternative was pretty much random selection
> from
> a large set of available cmavo, and we tried to avoid randomness. If
> a tie
> to zunle is not noted in the list, then there probably was no tie, and
> it
> was chosen either randomly or for contrast with some other word we had
> in mind.
>
> lojbab
>
> --
> lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
> Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
> 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA
> 703-385-0273
> Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:
> http://www.lojban.org
>
>
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