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Re: [lojban] RE:literalism

At 10:58 PM 10/20/2000 +0000, Jorge Llambias wrote:

la pycyn cusku di'e
>the whole "mal-" line is borrowed from Esperanto
>(somewhat inaccurately -- Esperanto "mal-" is closer to Lojban
>"tol," but the most common form "malbona" seems to ahve set the
>pattern).

I think that the choice of the rafsi "mal" was indeed influenced
by Esperanto, and probably the gismu {mabla} was formed so that
it could have that rafsi.
Nope. I used English "mal-" prefix as the English input, as in malformed and malaprop. It is an prefix indicating negative rather than opposite. Can't remember the other language words used. Oh, Chinese "bian" made the "bla", Spanish I also had "mal" - no idea why since I didn't do Spanish, Russian "umal". Hindi "alpkar" reinforced the 
"a-l-a" letters in that order.


 The usual line against Esperanto "mal-"
is that it supposedly makes people think of "bad", which is not
what it means (it corresponds to Lojban "tol" as you say). The
idea was that Lojban trumps Esperanto in this regard by having
"mal" actually have that bad connotation. That is my imagined
reconstruction from what I read, anyway.
I recognized the similarity to the Esperanto prefix when it came out, but noted the difference in meaning at the time. Actually, I think someone pointed it out to me, that some languages use "mal" for opposite and others use it for bad.
But since I did not and do not know much about Esperanto, I don't have a clear idea how much that prefix is used - only that it gets criticized a lot by Esperanto opponents. 


But I doubt that the words {malglico} et al have anything to do
with Esperanto. They just reflect a (healthy) attitude against
relying too much on English idioms for Lojban, given that English
is (at least for now) the one common language of Lojbanists.
Yep, the word dates from home discussions here in the time of Athelstan. We have always been very prone to malglico dual-language puns in this household, and the word may have been originally formed about them, but I think it was in response to some of Jim Brown's Loglanisms like "man-do" for "manning a ship" 


(As an aside, I think {malglico} is a badly formed lujvo,
it should be {glimabla}, but that's another thing, and probably
too late to do anything about it.)
The word was made long before dikyjvo, and I never have bought into the concept that strongly anyway. I like word patterns based on prefixes and suffixes when that is the way they work in natlangs. Derogatives and most other alterations to a basic meaning are usually expressed with a prefix on the root, comparatives with a suffix. 


Having said that, we have the additional problem that
the word "metaphor" is used in Lojban literature (as
are several other words) with a meaning only tangentially
related to its common meaning. For some reason I can't
understand, any tanru is called a metaphor in Lojban,
even if used with the most pedestrian literal meaning.
That was JCB's usage. What we call "binary metaphor" of modifier-modificand pairs, he called "metaphor". I presumed at the time I learned this that he was using it as a linguistic jargon meaning. Later I found that he misused linguistic jargon worse than most people who try to use the words. 


>Well, tanru don't need to be binary, except in the technical sense that
>they will always be analyzed that way.

They do if we accept the gi'uste definition of tanru:

"x1 is a binary metaphor formed with x2 modifying x3,
giving meaning x4 in language x5."

The word "metaphor" in that definition is not to be taken
with its usual English meaning. It only means "tanru".
But the place structure practically forces it to be binary,
even if one or both of the components can themselves be
tanru.
At the time we made the gismu and its place structure, we did not have Ivan's research, now in Chapter 4 of the book, on the wide variety of tanru that are not simple modifications. Furthermore, we have seen very very few usages of other kinds of tanru because, while permitted technically, they don't work well with the rule of tanru place structures (the place structure of a tanru is that of the final place) which dates from ancient Loglan history so far as I can tell. 

lojbab
--
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org