Re: Logical?

<ijzeren_jan@...> wrote:

>It appears to me, that "meaning" is not just a set of fixed
>milestones. Just like colours, all meanings seem to be part
>of one big continuum, instead. Every culture, every language
>picks its own points from that continuum and attaches names
>to them in the form of words.
>
>In other words, whether or not two words can be considered
>homonyms, is culturally determined.
>
>I'm wondering how loglangers handle this problem. Or don't
>they consider this a problem at all?
I agree with your view of the semantic space being one
big continuum, but I think there is reasonably salient
clumpiness here and there which makes the process of
assigning milestones not completely arbitrary.

At any rate, by "an unambiguous lexicon" I was thinking more
of avoiding sentences like "I saw her duck" where we do not
know whether someone stooped quickly, or owns a bird.  I
feel that carving up the semantic continuum, as the colors
famously illustrate, is more a matter of how much *precision*
you want, not so much a matter of *ambiguity*.

I think it is useful to analyze the problem of precision
from the view of hyponymy.  Even if language XYZ has, say,
"klur" to cover both English "red" and "orange", I still
don't think "red" and "orange" are required to translate
into XYZ as homonyms, but rather can be short versions of
paraphrases, e.g. "klur like blood" and "klur like fire".
This would not work if XYZ-speakers truly could not see, or
more accurately, could not learn to see, the difference.

Sapir-Whorf question:  are there any known cases in which
speakers tend to have _non-trivial_ difficulties seeing
the difference in colors of a foreign language where their
native lexicon does not distinguish them?  Or making any
other semantic distinction for that matter?


Regards

---   Mike

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