Re: Futurese

>> Your argumentation here is quite atrocious, I apologize
>> for saying it that way.
>
>Not at all. It's even pretty unbreakable.
Your argumentation contains a clear fallacy when you
changed "plane crash" into "plane crashing", on the
grounds that "crash" and "crashing" have very similar
meanings in English, and then applied the same grammatical
change turning "fire exit" into "fire exiting", ignoring
that English is not that coherent and in this case
the meanings of "exit" and "exiting" have little in
common.


>> For such cases when the two morphemes can be related in
>> different ways, the solution is simply to introduce
>> another morpheme to clarify it. So, to make clear what a
>> "fire exit" is, you could say "fire emergency exit" instead.
>
>Then why "fire exit" at the first place? Sorry to say that, but for many
>people, the equation "fire exit"="emergency exit" is far from obvious. In
>French, we would translate "fire exit" as "sortie de feu".
How many possibilities does an average person have to find
a "sortie de feu" compared to that of finding and "emergency
exit"?

OTOH, the French translation of "fire exit" into "sortie de
feu" is not that obvious either, because you're introducing
there a relational morpheme that clarifies the meaning of
the whole, something which the English original compound
doesn't do. In English you can also introduce such relational
words to clarify the meaning and say "exit of fire" instead,
which would be the English exact parallel of "sortie de feu";
but what we had was not "exit of fire" but "fire exit", so if
you want a litteral translation of it into French, that would
be "sortie feu", so that you can relate both words in several
ways as you can do in English.


> But we would never
>understand that as synonymous to "issue de secours": "emergency exit"! A
French
>person who doesn't know this expression would think it has to do with
letting
>the fire out of a place, certainly not that it has to do with letting
*people*
>out. And indeed, the expression "sortie de feu" refers to a not well-known
>device, special doors in very closed places without windows, opening when a
>fire comes to bring fresh air. It revives the fire a bit, but also cools it
>down, making it easier to handle.
>
>So please don't say that it was atrocious argumentation. It's rather the
>contrary: the expression "fire exit" to mean "emergency exit" is a twist
of the
>English language which may sound obvious to you, but is absolutely not, and
>many people would never have the idea to make that twist.
O.K. I think I've never denied that "fire exit" can be
interpreted in several ways and thus if you narrow its
meaning to just one of them the result is an idiomatic
expression; but maybe you didn't notice that I presented
it as an example of English compounds that are clearly
two-word ones, not as an example of an unambiguous
expression.

Best regards,
Javier

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