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

Hi Ed.

Ed Heil wrote:
>
> I think that Geroge Lakoff would say it only ought to be a "surprise"
> to followers of the cult of "objectivism" as he calls it. :)
>
> 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;
> distinguishable only with some effort.  ...
Hmmm.  Interesting, but I tend to doubt that.  The classical writers
and certainly the medievalists were highly aware of what they were doing
rhetorically... check out Geoffrey of Vinsauf and all the books on
Rhetoric.  If the term wasn't "metaphor," then it certainly was "imago."
But "metaphor" came in a while ago from the late Greek.  The Renaissance
poets were also completely aware of metaphors, _anargia_, _exemplum_ and
"conceits."  So what is this "it" that Barfield says we started calling
"metaphor," and so recently?

> Barfield insists that many people find the personifications (Love,
> Virtue, Peace, etc) of the middle ages and renaissance uninteresting
> because we have thrown off a 'participatory' style of thinking, in
> which abstractions were very real and living and interpenetrated with
> everyday reality in ways that seemed as obvious to them as the
> interpenetration of the theories of physics (electricity, and so on)
> with reality seem to us.
And that's precisely what I want to restore in Teonaht.  Interesting.

> He says that artificially stripping reality of its "participation" in
> higher realms, the divine, the ideal, the mana-filled, has made
> possible modern science and the major religions... but that it is
> founded on a lie, because in fact the world we experience *is*
> participatory -- but it participates not in a divinity that is beyond
> it and wholly separate from us, but in our humanity (and perhaps also
> in divinity communicated through humanity).
Hmmm.  I'm not clear about this here.  How has this stripping made
possible the "major religions"?  I would think quite the opposite.  It
may have made modern science possible, but the major religions I see
on the other side of the fence in this argument.

> That the world around us is not merely 'objective' but crucially
> arises from the interface between an inaccessible 'objective' reality
> and our consciousness is *also* what George Lakoff was trying to prove
> in _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things_!
A book I've often seen on the shelves and resisted buying for some
reason.
Partly because Lakoff was getting some bad press.  Should I reconsider?

> I doubt he's read Barfield, and I think the convergence of their
> conclusions is really interesting.
>
> Anyway, I think you'd find Barfield's work (if you haven't already
> read it) very interesting; a lot of what you've said about
> personifications resonates with what he's written (and I'm sure I
> haven't adequately expressed it in this message).
>
> 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'll give it a try.  But I hoped, actually, that my initial post would
inspire other conlangers to fess up:  how much do any of you consciously
use personifications and metaphors in the everyday parlance of your
languages?

I was specifically interested in knowing whether any of you had thought
to use metonyms for larger concepts.  I'm in the process of naming the
various parts of Tsorelai Mundya.  It is a huge, sprawling, walled city
built in concentric circles.  In medieval Teon, it was divided up
according
to trade; if you were a physician, you lived in the physician's
quarters,
above your place of work; you wore physician's clothes, and the
buildings
were colored the "physicians' colors."  If you were a merchant, you
lived
in another one of the concentric circles.  Modern Tsorelai Mundyans have
abandoned this regimentation, of course, but the old sections are still
there, along with their old names.  Trade and Defense form the outermost
circle.  Industry the next circle.  Commerce the next.  Agriculture, a
wide circle with its inner-city gardens and grazing grounds, the next.
And
so on, up through medicine, university, government, and religion which
stands
in the center.  The icons for these sections of town were deliberately
simplified in the days of old, and they have become the common words for
"industry," "agriculture," etc.  I could murder the Star Wars industry
for combining what I thought was original to Teon... a kind of baroque
quaintness with high technology.  And those DRESSES!   Although I'm sure
that it wasn't even original with them... I'm always finding that some
other
science fiction writer has gotten to something before I have! <G>  And
so it goes.  But at any rate, the tinkering with metonyms and
personifications has been going on for years with me... just curious
about other people's thoughts on this issue.

Thanks for your enlightening remarks!


Sally Caves
http://www.rochester.edu/~scaves/teoteach.html


       "QuchwIj Dayachqang'a' bang?"
>         (KHOOCH-widge da-YATCH-kang-a BANG?)
        I'm glad to know somebody else does this for pronunciation guidance!