Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@m...> wrote:


>I'm not clear on why so few readers were clear on the idiom quoted
>as 'I'm not clear on ...'.  Perhaps it came from reading too fast!
>The 'translation' into 'It isn't clear to me why ... ' is, of
course, >a metaphor.  I'm unsure whether a computational linguist
would >consider metaphors to be idioms, since the allegorical use of
terms >that don't strictly apply to the objects of discussion is a
technique >common to most natlangs (I don't say it's universal), and
one
>which supplies the means for much generalisation and transfer of
>meaning.
Mr. Wier himself gave us to the two separate phrasings:
"I think it could be interesting to include a requirement like this
in one of my nonhuman languages (which is why it caught my
attention), but I'm not clear how it would work out in practice.

"(There we go with one of those weird English idioms again, I
mean "it's not clear to me" :-) And "there we go" also deserves
mention in a list of idioms....)"

Is it possible that a word can be an idiom in one phrasing and not
an idiom in another even though the meaning is the same?

"I'm not clear..." seems to be a metaphor.  Perhaps a metaphor is a
subset of idiom.  One can't replace it with a synonym: "I'm not
plain," "I'm not evident."

However, in "it's not clear to me," there can be
substitutions: "it's not plain to me," "it's not evident to me."
And I maintain that this is not an idiom since "clear," in this
context, is synonymous with words like "evident" or "plain."  I
would imagine that the original meaning of "clear" was "not opage,
unmuddied."  Other meanings would have to be connotative.  But to
hold that this construction is an idiom would mean that any
connotative use of a word is an idiom.  I'm not ready to accept
that.  The meaning of this particular phrase is obvious from its
constituent parts.

Charlie
http://wiki.frath.net/user:caeruleancentaur