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On Fri, 18 Oct 2002 pycyn@hidden.email wrote:
> In a message dated 10/18/2002 5:39:51 AM Central Daylight Time,
> a.rosta@hidden.email writes:
>
> <<
> > Fair enough, but on this point I become a xodite: when applied to
> > classes that appear to be non-singleton (with 0 or more than 1 members),
> > lo'e/le'e force us into a new world-view. In such a case it is
> > perfectly legitimate for you say "I have no inkling what this means"
> > or "I have an inkling, but when I think it through it just doesn't
> > stand up", but part of its appeal is precisely that it coerces a
> > novel world-view onto the underlying 'facts' of the universe.
> >>
> Building koans into the language defeats the whole point of koans, which work
> by using the ordinary to force the extraordinary. Something labelled "this
> is to make you see the extraordinary" is just going to fail -- and lead to
> frustration. It is not the job of langauge to force a new world view but to
> give means to decribe the world of a given view adequately. It is a bonus
> that that means can also -- properly used -- force a reconceptualization of
> the world. In Lojban terms, putting in a word that is claimed to have a
> Whorfian effect, pretty much guarantees that it won't -- and it clutters up
> the language with useless detritus. Better, I think, to drop {lo'e}
> altogether or give it a meaning within the langauge as now bound. Especially
> when there is a pretty useful thing it could do (and historically has done,
> albeit confusedly).
The compromise is to realize that a common concept we've been kicking
around (say, "typical") has unintended consequences, and once we've
explored them, we find out that the concept is derived from something
intriguing.
In other words, our primitives don't have to be trivial.
On the other hand, all this tinkering must be, for me and my purposes,
constrained by the need to maintain viability with the existing Lojban
corpus. So we are confined to pondering "lo'e" from the CLL & usage.
--
Henry McCullers, an affable Plano, TX-area anti-Semite, praised the
Jewish people Monday for doing "a bang-up job" running the media.
"This has been such a great year for movies, and the new crop of fall
TV shows looks to be one of the best in years," McCullers said.
"And the cable news channels are doing a terrific job, too. Admittedly,
they're not reporting on the Jewish stranglehold on world finance,
but, hey, that's understandable."