Subject: RE:literalism

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 19:21:46 EDT

To pick up where I had to leave off Friday after noon.
Thanks to maikl for his definitions. Of course, on them his
expanation of "skyscraper" makes it not a metaphor, for a
skyscrape is not *like* something that could scrape the sky if the
sky were scrapable, but *is* something that could scrape the sky
.... I suppose that we want "does something like what would be
scraping the sky if the sky were scrapable" though, again, it really
just does what would be scraping if ... . "does something to the sky
which is like scraping on things which have surfaces"? 
Most of these lead us to have to say that calling an empty bottle
{botpi} is a metaphor, since it is something that would be a bottle if
it had content and so is like a bottle. But many people probably
would have no problem with that anyhow. (BTW, maikl's {botpi
zi'o} was one of the best bits of non-literalness in a long time. I still
wish I knew whether it was calculated, or accidental (two wrongs
make a right), or just a case of his instant insight agreeing --for
once -- with my slow calculations.) 
And, of course, so long as our likeness involves hypothetical,
dispositional, counterfactual conditions, we have to be careful in
lojban that these do not turn out to be trivially realized. There are
worlds where skies do have surfaces (and we can look up hera's
skirt as she tapdances on them) and where skyscrapers do,
therefore scrape or gouge or puncture the sky. 
"airplane" is apparently not metonymy; the wings were always
airfoils, as far as I can find, so it was the whole thing (though that
wasn't much beyond a wing in the early days) that is the plane. 

Anyhow, general remark. Ultimately, if Lojban survives, literalism has to 
lose. The
vocabulary of Lojban has to expand beyond the 6000 concepts or so that are 
encoded in the gismu in their various places. And there are only three ways 
to go: borrowing, creation, or metaphor (in the real -- not the JCB/Lo??an -- 
way). Literalism can't add to the semantic field; at best it can reduce a 
new concept to an old one, making it not new at all (that is what I meant by 
saying that literal tanru and lujvo don't add to the language -- of course 
they add words and text -- but not concepts, except as subsumed under 
existing ones). So, since creating new gismu is strengst verboten (remember 
all those WW2 prison movies?) and borrowing is hard and risky (and vaguely 
unlojbanic unless absolutely necessary) we will metaphor sooner or later. 
And I say the sooner the better -- when a good one comes along. And when it 
does, don't carp at it, take it as the gift it is and rejoice.