Re: CHAT: Homo Sapiens (was: fiery spirits)

On Monday, October 27, 2003, at 01:16 , John Cowan wrote:

> Ray Brown scripsit:
>
>> From the Orthodox, Catholic and mainstream Protestant point
>> of view, God is worshipped as three _persons_: God, three in
>> one & one in three, without confusion of persons.
>
> To that list may be added the so-called Monophysite
> churches, aka the Oriental Orthodox.
I was sort of including them under the umbrella of 'Orthodox'  :)

> The page at
> http://www.cnewa.org/ecc-apdxII-1-christol.htm contains a number of
> joint declarations of parts of the Catholic Church (up to and including
> Popes) and parts of various OO churches up to and including the various
> Patriarchs) which may be of interest.
Yes, very interesting.

> This passage, part of a joint declaration of Catholic and OO theologians,
> is "semantic" and so fit to post here:
>
>         For those of us in the Western tradition, to hear of the
>         one nature of Christ can be misleading, because it may be
>         misunderstood as a denial of his humanity. For those of us in
>         the Oriental Orthodox Churches to hear of two natures can be
>         misleading because it can be misunderstood as affirming two
>         persons in Christ.
Yes, the problem seems to be rather with 'nature'.  It's a reminder that
abstract
ideas don't always translate neatly. Greek 'physis', Latin 'natura' and
English
'nature' (and whatever words are used Armenian & Syriac) may have a good
deal of
common meaning, but there will not be 100% mapping. The different 10% or
20% can
be important.

>> Nope - a 'person' most certainly does not have to be a human.
>> And I believe Philip is right in saying that 'people' does not
>> necessarily imply humans.
>
> In Lojban, a "person" (prenu) is defined by having a personality.
And personality is the quality exhited by a person  :)

> My cats are prenu to me, for example.
Yep, cats & dogs do develop pesonalities IME.

> There is an entirely distinct
> word "remna" for a member of _Homo sapiens_, with variants "nanmu"
> and "ninmu" for male and female human beings (typically, but not
> necessarily, adults).
Conlangs can do this very neatly (conlangs aspiring to be auxlangs IMO
ought to do this neatly - but maybe that argument should be left for 'tha
other list'  :)

Ray
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