Re: [lojban] Re^n: literalism

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 05:00 AM 10/23/2000 -0400, pycyn@aol.com wrote:
>  Or you can take a legitimate existing form and
> twist it "robber cat" maybe, or "washing cat"  or some other
> vocables.  And ultimately the last is the most efficient and generally
> acceptable to speakers.  Of course, it changes the meaning of a
> word somewhat "cats" now includes some things that aren't cats,
> and thus it opens the way for another bunch of words -- for otter
> and weasel and ...

But since a raccoon is not any kind of a cat, that is a metaphor that 
misleads.  But a robber-mammal would work, and it presumably would have an 
acceptable place structure using conventional analysis (as would a cat 
metaphor, I will note - all the animal gismu have approximately the same 
place structures).  Now I ask - are you claiming that robber-mammal is the 
same concept as "mammal" simply because it has the same final term?  Or is 
it the same as "robber"?  The argument is NOT that you cannot be 
metaphorical, but rather that the metaphors should preserve the place 
structure logic.  I think there will be exceptions, but I remain unsure 
that they need to be common.  I think we have pretty good semantic coverage 
with the gismu list, with most of the exceptions being concrete concepts 
that should be borrowings or are enough like some gismu in place structure 
that the place structure derivation rules can probably be followed while 
still being somewhat metaphorical.

We still need some examples where non-literal works better than literal.

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