Re: An apology to Ray and some other points answered

In a message dated 4/27/01 12:39:30 AM, Daniel44@BTINTERNET.COM writes:

<< To the point about metaphor in Uusisuom and 'hanti/hanto' specifically, I

would imagine that some form of metaphor is used by every language on earth.

That said, I try to avoid it in Uusisuom as much as possible. >>

    First of all, the human mind works by using metaphors, so it's impossible
to have a truly natural language without literally hundreds of functional,
entrenched and conceptual metaphors.  They conflict, though.  If you want
Uusisuom to be like a natural language, you're doing a good job by creating
your own metaphors that make sense to you.  But if you truly are trying to
avoid metaphor, then...well, why aren't you?  I don't know.  It doesn't make
sense to me.

<<Though I agree that some use of metaphor here is clear, it's important to

note that almost all cultures and religions in the world make some

connection between life and flowers.>>

    I think my point was that if you look at all your words with the root
"han", I do not doubt that anyone on Earth would be able to see the
metaphorical mappings--that's what humans do best.  However, if they had just
the root, and had to guess what the different derivations meant, I think they
would be totally clueless, since the mappings are not predictable.  So, as
before, they'd need to know the words and memorize them, they wouldn't be
able to put them together as easily as one would in, say, Esperanto (I
apologize, but this is the best example I can think of), where if you have
the word "floro", meaning "flower", you know the word "flori" is going to
mean "to flower".  Whether or not you can guess what "to flower" means
depends on your background (it's, yet again, a metaphor), but you can't
seriously expect anyone to go from the word "flower" to the verb "to live"
without knowing that there's a connection.  I don't think they'd even
understand in context, or if they did, they'd wonder, "Why on Earth did he
say 'I flower in Boston' instead of 'I live in Boston'?"  Of course, this
assumes that you have the same verb there.  If you don't, then it'd be
something like "Why did he say 'I flower well these days'?"
    But, no more.  I'm tired of this.  I probably shouldn't even have written
this.  Unless anyone has specific questions about metaphor and how they can
be used and manipulated in constructed languages, I'm through with metaphor.

-David

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