Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Beyond Whorf: "things," "qualities," and the origin of nouns and adjectives

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 06 Aug 2000 22:34:44 +0300

"Alfred W. Tueting (Tüting)" wrote:
> > > (all in all, a pretty pleasant bundle - with "beautiful" being
> > > a bundle itself for "fair-blue-eyed-smiling-slender-...").
> >
> > As in "Az a szép, / akinek a szeme kék"?
> 
> Pretty deep insights! What an impressive "bundle" - do you also
> hear the melody?

No. I don't really know it -- I only heard that line once, more
than 20 years ago, performed by a crowd that would've been very
mediocre singers even if they'd been sober ...

> (The 'picture' of the blue-eyed beauty seems
> stronger than that of the dark-eyed - "...akinek a szeme fekete" -

... and they actually sang "akinek a szeme fekete", probably
customising the text for some black-eyed lady (though of that
I wasn't aware until much later, when I saw the line in print).

> because of syntactically coming first in order?)

Syntactically? How's that?

For the record, the traditional Bulgarian idea of female beauty,
perpetuated in innumerable folk songs, expressly calls for black
eyes and fair hair (compared to diamonds and gold respectively).

> > Which certainly is {melxli}. But: _szép_ used as a noun is also
> > {melxli}, or in any case {melni'u}. The same is true of Turkish
> > _güzel_; but certainly not of {lo melbi}.
> 
> Hungarian "a szép" first of all seems to refer to /le melni'u/,
> but different to German ("die Schöne"), it's ambiguous, also
> having the meaning of German: "das Schöne (in unserem Leben/in
> unserer Beziehung)": [...]

German (and Spanish and Russian and Arabic) make you choose
a gender into which to substantivise an adjective, and that
choice necessarily narrows down the interpretation; this is
why it may be more interesting to look at languages such as
Hungarian (and Turkish and Persian).

But yes, there is this meaning of `beautiful' when nouned. Let
us count them: (1) `beauty', the abstract quality (cf. Chinese);
(2) `the beautiful' as an abstract concept (similar to the first,
but perhaps not the same); (3) `beautiful thing' (any sort of thing,
not necessarily physical), the vanilla meaning of {lo melbi}; (4)
`beautiful (young) woman' (metaphorically extendable).

Can (2) also be called {lo melbi}, you ask? Well, X is {lo melbi}
iff {X melbi}. Is `the beautiful (in our life)' itself beautiful?

--Ivan