Subject: Re: [lojban] RE:literalism

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 22:38:03 -0400

At 10:58 PM 10/20/2000 +0000, Jorge Llambias wrote:
>la pycyn cusku di'e
> >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).
>
>I think that the choice of the rafsi "mal" was indeed influenced
>by Esperanto, and probably the gismu {mabla} was formed so that
>it could have that rafsi.

Nope. I used English "mal-" prefix as the English input, as in malformed 
and malaprop. It is an prefix indicating negative rather than 
opposite. Can't remember the other language words used. Oh, Chinese 
"bian" made the "bla", Spanish I also had "mal" - no idea why since I 
didn't do Spanish, Russian "umal". Hindi "alpkar" reinforced the
"a-l-a" letters in that order.

> The usual line against Esperanto "mal-"
>is that it supposedly makes people think of "bad", which is not
>what it means (it corresponds to Lojban "tol" as you say). The
>idea was that Lojban trumps Esperanto in this regard by having
>"mal" actually have that bad connotation. That is my imagined
>reconstruction from what I read, anyway.

I recognized the similarity to the Esperanto prefix when it came out, but 
noted the difference in meaning at the time. Actually, I think someone 
pointed it out to me, that some languages use "mal" for opposite and others 
use it for bad.

But since I did not and do not know much about Esperanto, I don't have a 
clear idea how much that prefix is used - only that it gets criticized a 
lot by Esperanto opponents.

>But I doubt that the words {malglico} et al have anything to do
>with Esperanto. They just reflect a (healthy) attitude against
>relying too much on English idioms for Lojban, given that English
>is (at least for now) the one common language of Lojbanists.

Yep, the word dates from home discussions here in the time of 
Athelstan. We have always been very prone to malglico dual-language puns 
in this household, and the word may have been originally formed about them, 
but I think it was in response to some of Jim Brown's Loglanisms like 
"man-do" for "manning a ship"

>(As an aside, I think {malglico} is a badly formed lujvo,
>it should be {glimabla}, but that's another thing, and probably
>too late to do anything about it.)

The word was made long before dikyjvo, and I never have bought into the 
concept that strongly anyway. I like word patterns based on prefixes and 
suffixes when that is the way they work in natlangs. Derogatives and most 
other alterations to a basic meaning are usually expressed with a prefix on 
the root, comparatives with a suffix.

>Having said that, we have the additional problem that
>the word "metaphor" is used in Lojban literature (as
>are several other words) with a meaning only tangentially
>related to its common meaning. For some reason I can't
>understand, any tanru is called a metaphor in Lojban,
>even if used with the most pedestrian literal meaning.

That was JCB's usage. What we call "binary metaphor" of 
modifier-modificand pairs, he called "metaphor". I presumed at the time I 
learned this that he was using it as a linguistic jargon meaning. Later I 
found that he misused linguistic jargon worse than most people who try to 
use the words.

> >Well, tanru don't need to be binary, except in the technical sense that
> >they will always be analyzed that way.
>
>They do if we accept the gi'uste definition of tanru:
>
>"x1 is a binary metaphor formed with x2 modifying x3,
>giving meaning x4 in language x5."
>
>The word "metaphor" in that definition is not to be taken
>with its usual English meaning. It only means "tanru".
>But the place structure practically forces it to be binary,
>even if one or both of the components can themselves be
>tanru.

At the time we made the gismu and its place structure, we did not have 
Ivan's research, now in Chapter 4 of the book, on the wide variety of tanru 
that are not simple modifications. Furthermore, we have seen very very few 
usages of other kinds of tanru because, while permitted technically, they 
don't work well with the rule of tanru place structures (the place 
structure of a tanru is that of the final place) which dates from ancient 
Loglan history so far as I can tell.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org