Subject: RE: greeks and love (was RE: [lojban] registry of experimental cmavo - new pr...

From: "Craig" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 21:16:14 -0400

><The eskimos actually
>speak aglutinative languages in which there can be as many words for snow
as
>you want, but around five roots that meant snow - but these often referred
>to other things as well, as does English (powder might mean snow if
>encountered in a poem, for instance.) >
>Depends on how narrowly you define "Eskimo" : not all the Polar native
>languages are agglutinating, they have widely varying number of roots for
>snow of one sort and another, though none that has only one root regularly
>used in that way.

Inuit and close relations of it.

><Eros was
>ALWAYS the sexual kind, for example, while philo was ALWAYS a more 'how you
>feel' kind. how you felt varied with philo; in plato and aristotle it was
>more like friendship than love>
>Pedophilia, not friendly though I suppose it could have something to do
with
>how you feel (gently or roughly, say). For that matter, philarguria, the
>love of money, 1 Tim 6:10. Non-sexual eros is a tad harder to come up with
>since it does always seem to involve strong desires and the like -- quite
>inappropriate for philosophers, one supposes. But there is erasichrematos
>"covetous, avaricious" -- passionate, perhaps, but not sexual (certainly
not
>preFreudianly) -- and a general sense of "to desire passionately" of
things.
>Agape is even harder to pin down but seems to turn up in all the senses so
>far explored. I can't remember which one the Symposium is officially
about.

Only clssical greek gives three meanings for the three kinds of love,
borrowings to English all use Philo with few exceptions (erotic and
derivitives thereof, all sexual at least originally).

><Whatever happened to total unambiguity?>

>Never was any, never will be. No theory -- and certainly no practice --
>allows it in language. And if you think the descriptive component has
>problems, imagine what happens in the emotive one, where there is not even
a
>"common ground" against which to check things.

I know there never was any, but there still IS a CLAIM of total ambiguity. I
like the language even though it is ambiguous, but I'm not here for the
unambiguity part. I think we should stop even saying we are unambiguous.