Re: [lojban] Re: .ai casnu lo si'o cimjvo si sidysmujvo

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

Historically, metaphorical compounds were preferred by JCB (who made many of 
them and called compounds metaphors, after all) but the force of logicalness in 
its more oppressive form eventually won out.  The problem was (and is) that 
getting a metaphor depends a lot on background information: general culture and 
personal experiences.  As a result, what is a brilliant flash of insight to one 
person is a meaningless mush to another.  The same is true, to a lesser extent, 
of literal combinations (so called): consider the range of possibilities for 
such clear English expressions as "green house" and "black bird" where all of 
the usual ones are quite literal but often missed by even native speakers.  No 
rules work in general; each case has to be explained on its own.


----- Original Message ----
From: Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tue, October 19, 2010 7:32:50 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: .ai casnu lo si'o cimjvo si sidysmujvo

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 6:03 AM, Lindar <lindarthebard@yahoo.com> wrote:
> While it is far too late for me to try to write that much in Lojban, I
> had to use my dictionary only maybe 10 times for that whole thing.
> o'asai!!

.ui .i'e .o'a dai .i za'a do mutce lo ka lobypli .io

> When a lujvo could NOT POSSIBLY have another meaning
> (like wet lujvo or nickel-dog), I think it's fine to have an implicit
> metaphor marker.

This is one of the main reasons I'm in favor of allowing lujvo to be
metaphorical: If we don't, there are vast ranges of lujvo space, most
of it really, that are pretty much useless.  We could try to find some
literal meaning to give to "nikyge'u"-- a dog with a nickel tag on its
collar??-- or "cimjvo"-- a lujvo that you've written out on a piece of
paper and dipped in water??-- but it doesn't seem possible to find
meanings that are both literal and useful.  Perhaps those who dislike
metaphor in lujvo would like to leave most of the lujvo space without
meanings?  I'm just guessing here.  But that could make some sense,
for instance it would make the remaining lujvo easier to distinguish
when heard in noisy situations, since they'd have less competition.
The larger our community grows, though, the less likely it seems to me
that we will leave large parts of the lujvo space completely
untouched.

I'm definitely in favor of at least this much of a prohibition on
cimjvo: A lujvo should not have a metaphorical meaning if there's any
way to give it a literal meaning that's useful at all.  Literal
meanings should have priority.

> Anybody that feels to the contrary I imagine would be
> very stiff/boring.

I don't think that's fair at all.  We all want Lojban to be exciting
and interesting, but we all want it to be tight and controlled in some
places yet loose and expressive in others.  When I talked about cimjvo
with Robin recently (who's very much against them), he suggested some
other places where he would rather see looseness, for instance he said
he supports the creation of lots of zi'evla and new gismu.

> There's a place and time for jvajvo and cimjvo alike; we should have
> rules prescribing when it is and is not appropriate to avoid having
> large and indecipherable bodies of metaphorical text just like English,
> which is one of the things we'd all like to avoid.

I had a hunch that maybe some of the instinctual revulsion towards
cimjvo, this feeling that they must be indecipherable nonsense, might
trace back to the many za'e dusycimjvo invented by la .xelsem.!  I'm
still trying to figure out what a "banzgu" is!!  I happen to love the
work of la .xelsem. and it's part of what drew me into Lojban in the
first place, but that's not what we're talking about here.  We're
talking about lujvo with clear, defined meanings that we all
understand, just that are somewhat more loosely connected to the
meanings of their root gismu.

mi'e .telselkik. mu'o

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