Subject: RE:literalism

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 12:42:59 EDT

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:
<<How does Esperanto come into it? >>
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). 
<<It is definitely a nice metaphor, but I feel it goes somehow
against the spirit of Lojban. Perhaps I will be proved wrong.>>
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? 

<<I have no problem in considering software
as members of {lo'i minji}, but I can't really think of kids as
members of {lo'i ratcu}. >>
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:
<<Tanru are "binary compounds". Kennings are "compound metaphors", often of 
two units & thus deceptively resembling the former. In tanru, the modifying 
gismu limits the scope of the modified, or together they specify the area of 
their overlap. A kenning paints a picture; one term sets the context, the 
other makes a metaphorical substitution that suggests the referent WITHIN 
this context (famous example: "tunafish is 'chicken of the sea'"). A kenning 
is really a kind of naming (hence my ME LA). "Rug rats" does not mean 
LOLTAXFU RATCU & it would be seriously misleading to turn this into a 
lujvo...>>
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.