From pycyn@aol.com Fri Oct 20 09:43:04 2000 Return-Path: X-Sender: Pycyn@aol.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@egroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-6_1_0); 20 Oct 2000 16:43:03 -0000 Received: (qmail 13930 invoked from network); 20 Oct 2000 16:43:03 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m3.onelist.org with QMQP; 20 Oct 2000 16:43:03 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-r16.mail.aol.com) (152.163.225.70) by mta3 with SMTP; 20 Oct 2000 16:43:03 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-r16.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v28.31.) id a.17.c8683c2 (4236) for ; Fri, 20 Oct 2000 12:43:00 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <17.c8683c2.2721d013@aol.com> Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 12:42:59 EDT Subject: RE:literalism To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Windows AOL sub 41 From: pycyn@aol.com xod: <<(I always thought "skyscraper" was a good designation for an airliner. After all, they do make a scraping sound.)>> Gee, I can't say I've ever heard that or,a t least, recognized it as scraping. They do slice off (plane) a thin slice of air, so I guess that the stock name will be accepable in Lojban. But what if it weren't? xorxes: <> aside from confirming that "sky scraper" and its calques are the international word for the building type (aulun, what is the Chinese?), the whole "mal-" line is borrowed from Esperanto (somewhat inaccurately -- Esperanto "mal-" is closer to Lojban "tol," but the most common form "malbona" seems to ahve set the pattern). <> Well. The Spirit of Lojban is a little hard to locate, but seems to have two homes at least on this issue. One comes roundabout from JCB, a failed social scientist (good at hoking data but too humanistic too carry off jargonic vanities with a straight face), who always wanted to maintain the aesthetic dimension within the logical -- as all good logicians (of which he was not one) do. The other locus has been the bulk of the Loglanists and Lojbanists since, usually computer-focused and, within that broad range, programmers, who have tended (perhaps incidentally, perhaps not) to see loglans as computer languages to be dealt with in the same rule-prescribed ways, ignoring human elements as well as the aesthetic ones. From this slightly prejudicial survey, it would appear that "sky scraper" might be at home in one home of the spirit but not at the other. By the way, if by "metaphor" you mean something inaccurate, in what way is "skyscraper" one and "airplane" not? Or "tall tall building" for that matter? <> Maybe you need more kids (small goats?) . Children are much closer to rats (and small ones crawling around on the rug especially) than a program is to a machine -- they are living mammals, pestilential, fuzzy, kinda cute, etc. etc. Programs have no moving parts, indeed no functional mechanical parts at all, no concrete existence, etc. etc. By the way, I don't actually think that "rug rats" is all that good and I like xod's "program," which is just to make my point again -- literality has nothing to do with it. maikl: <> Well, tanru don't need to be binary, except in the technical sense that they will always be analyzed that way. I can't speak to kennings, since I still don't know what they are (rule three in definitions: don't be metaphorical, so "painting a picture" does not help in the definition of a non-visual item; rule two is "don't be circular" so saying "makes a metaphorical substitution" is defining "metaphor" seems less than useful.) Of the dozen or so recognized ways of constructing tanru and lujvo, giving only two (modifier-modified and overlap) seems restrictive even for a literalist (which, as I keep reminding y'all, maikl is ordinarily not). Actually, "chicken of the sea" is pretty good (aside from its current commercial use) and surely better for a wide array of purposes than {finpe} followed by some version of the scientific name of tuna. What about it is painting a picture -- as opposed to pointing to features, say -- is not clear (which is context, which is within the context, for example?). Now would be a good time to be a literalist, perhaps.