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Re: [lojban] By the way < tangent?
At 11:41 AM 1/20/03 -0600, Steven Belknap wrote:
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.
But a metaphor should have something to do with the correct
meaning. Lojban tanjo pertains to the trigonometric tangent, and does NOT
have anything to do with the other sort of tangent (meaning "barely
touching"). Only the fact that the English word is polysemous leads to the
use we made of it.
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.
The geometric meaning is not the correct one; Lojban uses the trigonometric
meaning for tanjo which is even more specialized. The geometric meaning
would be "x1 is tangential to object/form x2 at point/locus x3". tanjo's
place structure looks nothing like that.
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