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Re: [lojban] Re: Speaker specificity: {.i da'i na vajni}
I just wanted to quickly butt in and voice disagreement with this example:
On Tue, 30 Sep 2014, Dustin Lacewell wrote:
I'm putting this here because I was asked to do so (probably for
completeness in discourse)
The example I habitually provide is, imagine some men are hanging out by a
water-cooler and some women walking past hear them making sexist remarks.
One women isn't going to confuse the other by saying something like "Those
dogs are disgusting". Does the listener really require such a
front-and-center indication of non-veridicality? As far as I'm concerned
the answer is blaring "no".
I think the answer is a clear 'yes' if you are going to effectively
communicate with speakers who are not familiar to your culture's
metaphors, whether that be primitive AI, hypothetical aliens, or just
people from a culture a few countries away where "dogs" is not a metaphor
for intellectually-primitive-human-males.
I think overall, having an efficient way to say what you really mean is a
good thing, and in this case, that means having an ability to specify in
a concise manner that something is or isn't metaphorical.
Having that means the more literal-minded, or those who struggle with
metaphorical speech, such as many autistic individuals for example, can be
readily cued in to what you are implying. It means children (and more
generally though less commonly mentally mature people as well) will be
less likely to pick up mis-conceptions when delving into a new topic -
because sure comparing people to animals is conceptually a fairly
widespread metaphor in its various permutations - but when you get into
less typical/casual matters it's no longer that easy.
The inability to distinguish between the literal and metaphorical quickly
will also manifest when you have a situation with both literal and
metaphorical instances of the thing involved. The above example becomes
insta-ambiguous if you also add in a couple of actual dogs doing something
disgusting, or appearing disgusting. Of course in your example that
doesn't strike me as a likely problem, but I think it's easy enough to run
into cases like that in practice.
I think we also overlook another value of the ability to be explicitly
metaphorical: it enables one to readily introduce new metaphors which
otherwise would require more load on the other parties in the conversation
to figure out. This is a generalization of my first point about speakers
who don't know the metaphor being deployed - except instead of limiting
our consideration to metaphors regularly used in one culture being
misunderstood by others, consider how much easier it is to throw a truly
novel metaphor into a conversation - trying this in English has often
generated uncomprehending looks when I've tried it, because I guess some
people just aren't good at recognizing metaphors they aren't familiar with
on the fly. I think we can have more creative and expressive uses of
language if we can readily differentiate the literal meaning from
non-literal.
Personally, one of the points which currently draw me to Lojban is it's
claimed ability to allow unambiguous communication efficiently. I
want a one-or-two syllable way to draw the distinction between me
being literal and not. (Though I don't have enough lojban knowledge yet to
particularly care whether le/lo have anything to do with making this
distinction.)
Or maybe I missed the whole point of this "veridicality" discussion, in
which case apologies for me wasting the time you all had to spend to read
this.
mu'o mi'e .aleksandr.kojevnikov. do'u
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