Re: LUNATIC again

On Sat, 7 Nov 1998, David G. Durand wrote:

in response to Lojbab who wrote:
> >languages.  Far from it.  I am merely showing that more precise use of
> >English can prevent misunderstandings and misevaluations of your work.
> >People WILL respond differently to things that are called "art" than to
> >things that purport by their label to be the "real thing" that the art is
> >supposed to resemble or represent.
My mother's a sculptor.  She will frequently say, I'm working on my
"lion."  In context, we all know what she means.  No one thinks that by
calling it a "lion" she purports by her words that it is the real thing.
Were she to try to urge a gallery to display her lion, she would probably
speak of it as a sculpture.  But she's "in house," as it were.  So are we
here on Conlang.

David:
> >>One word-glosses are a characteristic of expediency of documentation, I
> >>think, not just of poverty of distinction.
> >
I will second this...

> >But it is impossible to tell, unless you actually see usages where the
> >one-word
> >glosses differ in meaning from the language they translate.  Alltogther too
> >often, people have clearly failed to consider the problem of avoiding a
> >relexification of English semantics.  It takes hard work to avoid distinctions
> >that in many cases are subconcious.  maybe most conlangers (including
> >artlangers)
> >do this work.  But the posts of lexicons that I see on this list usually
> >don't give any clue to this work.
>
> This is true. My question is why assume that they _didn't_ do this. And, in
> any case, it's still a different language if the grammar is different, even
> if the word-concepts map one-to-one.
Just another point: some of the new conlangers have lexical programs that
allow them to make glossaries and "flip" them for ease in dictionary
making--it's immensely time-consuming to enter each word and its
definition(s) by hand; I thought briefly about doing this for T. but it
works best only if you HAVE a one-to-one relationship between your word
and English.

> Insofar as you claim that language is definable, I disagree. And I
> definitely think that such a single-minded notion is out of place here,
> where so many need to push the boundaries of language.
These boundaries DO need to be pushed, and for all the reasons that I've
marshalled as well.  Sally
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Sally Caves

Li fetil'aiba, dam hoja-le uen.
volwin ly, vul inua aiba bronib.

This leaf, the wind takes her.
She's old, and born this year.
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