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[lojban] Re: By the way < tangent?

The tangent function can be thought of (and originally was thought of) as the length of a straight line touching one end of a circular arc of unit radius perpendicular to that radius and terminated by the secant drawn from the center through the other end. This function is mathematically identical to the more usual definition in terms of the angle subtended by the arc at the center of the circle. The terms tangens and secans were introduced by Finkius in 1583. The "tangential" behavior of the tangent function can also be seen by plotting the values from 0 to pi/2, such plots showing a divergence to infinity. 

On Monday, January 20, 2003, at 07:10  PM, Craig wrote:


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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