[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [lojban] RE^whatever:literalism
At 10:52 AM 10/25/2000 -0400, pycyn@aol.com wrote:
lojbab:
<<Because we are European language speakers and know our own language and
culture. We *assume* we are biased towards European metaphors, so we
eschew them.>>
Guilty until proven innocent, with a guarantee that the latter proof
will not be allowed to come forward -- since the form has already
been rejected. Not a great plan and a long way from "let usage
decide": it can't decide in favor of something we are forbidden to
use.
No one forbids anything. Note that the list of lujvo I've asked people to
give keywords to (and later place structures) consists of ALL the ones I
found used in text, not just ones that someone likes. At this point I want
all proposals to be treated equally, and make decisions about which to
include in the dictionary later (based on usage or on other factors yet to
be determined). Unfortunately, most people who are volunteering, instead
of doing the relatively simple job of analyzing what we have now, are
instead choosing to analyze concepts and try to find better words for those
concepts. That is a legitimate exercise, and it might justifiably be
slanted against non-literals, but it is hardly "usage" at all, much less
usage in the quantity needed to "decide". What people actual use when they
write about raccoons remains to be seen, (unless there is some prior usage
I don't know about).
But even if we presumed that the bias affected usage to the extent of
calling it "forbidding", malglico usages are mostly "forbidden" to native
English speakers, not to speakers of other languages. It is really "using
a non-literal metaphor from your native language for a concept that may not
be restricted to your culture, and where the non-literal metaphor might
suggest something quite different to another culture" that is discriminated
against. We are especially hard on English because Lojban is dominated by
English speakers and it is a justified fear that English-based metaphor
meanings will creep in and tend to dominate and perhaps displace other
meanings for the metaphor (good old "man-do" as a TLI Loglan example).
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