Re: Using METONYMS; was: O Duty (Was: "If")

On 24 May 99, at 19:40, Ed Heil wrote:

> Sally Caves wrote:
> > Ed Heil wrote:
> > > I've read a bit of Owen Barfield lately, and I highly
recommend him.
> > > One of the things that he insists on is that it is only fairly
> > > recently, in historical terms, that we even had to start calling it
> > > "metaphor."  Before that it was just that concepts were deeper; they
> > > had inner and outer meanings that were part and parcel of each other;
<snip>

> > > I only know two of his books well enough to recommend
them: _Saving
> > > the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry_ and _Speaker's Meaning_.  The
> > > latter is a bit more linguistically oriented and a lot shorter.
I've read only _Poetic Diction_, which I can recommend strongly,
though it focuses more on literary history than on linguistics.  The
middle part of the book is a study of several specific words in
Greek, Latin/Romance, and Germanic showing a wearing-down of
meaning in some cases and a split from an original word meaning
both an abstract and a concrete (e.g., old Greek "pneuma"
spirit/wind) to a modern set of several words with a narrower range
of meaning.

Thanks for reminding me of this.  I hadn't thought of Barfield in a
couple of years at least, though _Poetic Diction_ influenced me a
lot while I was working on my naturalistic conlangs Pliv and
Toaliralolo in mid-1996.  "dla" in the Plifv protolanguage meant both
a god and an oxygen-well; in the later form of the language sound
change had gone two different directions with it in different usages
... I don't recall the details now.  I may post some of the Plif
material on my web page though it's one of my earliest conlangs
and least sophisticated phonologically & grammatically.


Jim Henry III
Jim.Henry@pobox.com
http://www.pobox.com/~jim.henry/
Book reviews, essays, etexts, information about Esperanto, etc.