[lojban] Metaphors (and why making them is a smart move)

[Escape Landsome <escaaape@gmail.com>]

.

Hello.

In natlangs, people can carry metaphors.   For instance, one will say
"his heart is filled with anger", as if "anger" was some liquid
substance and his heart a recipient.

Of course, scientifically speaking, we know that to be wrong, but
nevertheless the metaphor speaks to us, and what is more, it is not
even dangerous to carry it, for the meaning is clear and context makes
it wholly unambiguous.

[It can be hard that this latter is not true in the general case.  I
personally think this "logicist" view is rather misleading.]

I don't really know how things happen in Lojban but from what I know
of it, I guess there are no metaphors at all (correct me if I'm
mistaken).  What I guess is likely to happen in a loglan is that you
will have *two* brodas :

- x1 = RECIPIENT is filled with FLUID

- x2 = EXPERIENCER is "filled" (in the metaphorical sense of the term)
with FEELING

Now, this might very well be more precise, more logic, whatever...
But what this is *not* is "economical".   Indeed, with such a way to
deal with the metaphorical meaning of a predicate, we need a one-to-
many mapping from the "natlang general predicate" to a bunch of new
loglan predicates, each one expliciting *one* metaphorical meaning.

Just suppose there are some other metaphorical ways of interpreting
"is filled with" (I have no example of this presently, but such cases
exist, and I even argue that the number of metaphorical
interpretations of one natlang predicate is open)...   Then, we would
need a BIG NUMBER of new loglan predicates !

This is by no way a cheap way to deal with "meaning", and I rather
suggest that a predicate could be metaphorical in use, --- but there
be some other syntactic way to turn the interpretation into one or
several "interpreting directions".

For instance, we would have a broda x1 = "is filled with" (general
spatial-recipient sense), and some "words" y1, y2, y3 to indicate
"space", "time", "feelings", and so on, and some operation %, in such
a way that the metaphorical meaning could be set by saying :

x1%y1

x1%y2

x1%y3

and of course : x1 alone, who would let the metaphorical
interpretation deliberately ambiguous...

Thus, the cardinality of predicates would not explode as it is wont to
do right now (if I understood the problem correctly).

--Escape

.

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