Re: [lojban] Re: Specific terminology - the case of philosophy terminology

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

Back in the day, at least, Logjam had an excessively (positivistic) philosophical vocabulary.  Much of this has been ground down in use to be totally vernacular.  However, all the raw material for creating the technical vocabulary of arrange philosophical systems is still available.  Probably it would be best to pay less attention to the vulgar term recycled in philosophy (and often mislead readers to think they understand or to understand wrongly) than to the actual intended meanings (though that louses up many famous arguments).  Thus the route to meaningful translation is through lujvo for the most part. As noted, solving how to translate a word from one author may not help much with the same word in the next author.

Sent from my iPad

On Mar 18, 2012, at 1:01 PM, iesk <pa.fae@gmx.de> wrote:

> On Mar 18, 6:15 pm, Escape Landsome <escaa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I want to translate some philosophical works into Lojban
> 
> May I ask which ones?
> 
> 
>> but here comes the problem of terminology
>> 
>> Many philosophical terms come in fact from vernacular usage, but are
>> given in the meantime a new meaning...
> 
> … which is, more often than not, not universally agreed upon among
> philosophers.
> 
>> 
>> For instance, "liberté" (liberty ? freedom ?) has not quite the same
>> sense that the vernacular use of the word has
> 
> Nevertheless, the meaning which the word takes in the context of a
> particular philosophical work is ‘carved‘ from its vernacular usage;
> however esoteric the particular author’s take on ‘liberté’ (or
> whatever)—by using that particular word the philosopher alludes to its
> common-sense meaning (which the philosopher can then contort).
> 
> 
>> 
>> In fact, either a philosophical term comes form a greek or latin
>> etymology and the translation should convey the component meaning of
>> its core and affixes
>> either it is some very common term that has been "dignified" to a
>> brand new philosophical meaning
> 
> In many cases those Greek or Latin terms were more or less ordinary
> words when they became part of the philosophical discourse. In other
> cases, granted, they are purposely coined neologisms. And often, they
> are themselves translations (eg ‘substance‘ is, if I remember
> correctly, a rather liberal translation of the corresponding Greek
> term [which I don’ŧ remember]).
> 
> 
>> So, I warn you, I don't know what termes already exist in Lojban, for
>> philosophic purpose... (and I regret there doesn't seem to exist a
>> page which lists such terms, by themas or something)
> 
> Cf. http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Vocabulary (to which your philosophical
> terminology could be added?).
> 
> 
>> But, admitting there are few (correct me if I'm wrong), how to create them ?
> 
> I think it is a challenge that Lojban words are not exactly cognate to
> natlang terms. It might be interesting to investigate a translation of
> a philosophical work into a genuinely ‘foreign‘ language and see how
> the translator delt with the terminology. Like, I don’t know, in a
> Korean translation of Spinoza, where translator, supposedly, could not
> simply ‘copy‘ etymologically.
> 
> Not that this would be a helpful answer … :/
> 
> -iesk
> 
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