Subject: Re: [lojban] Re^n: literalism

From: "michael helsem" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 15:50:18 GMT

>From: [email-masked]
li'o
>unless the explanation
>already pushes beyond the old concepts, all you have is an old
>concept, a potential that has already been covered.

Take Prigogine's "emergent order" for instance. That's a subtle & important 
idea, rather challenging to traditional "craftsman"
metaphors, & presently reduced only so far as a cliche' couplet.
It would be nice to say it in a single word of fewer syllables, but
what does that have to do with its availability as a novel idea?
Or consider "wuy", a word i coined to mean "casual unquestioning
acceptance". One can use this concept already without having had
a word for it. And there's the experience of learning to ride a
bicycle: no one word for this, & probably not even explicable in
descriptive language at all. You just have to do it.

li'o
>But suppose you want to talk about a racoon, in
>alanguage which doesn't have a word for it or any notion of it up til
>the first confrontation.

another name for racoon is "washbear", & MELA LUMCI CRIBE is
intelligible. i'm not sure LUMCRIBE would work.

li'o
>I don't see how non-literal lujvo, by themselves, threaten lojbanic
>purity,

it's not a question of purity, but rather of whether we want to
enshrine a bunch of metaphors that may prove seriously misleading
when substantial numbers of non-european learners are trying to
figure out what sort of thing scrapes the sky when there isn't a
sky to scrape.
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