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In a message dated 10/18/2002 10:53:39 AM Central Daylight Time, xod@hidden.email writes: << >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. But isn't that the goal of the project! JCB didn't have a bizarre >> I didn't say he did (although there is some evidence that he did, and Whorf certainly did). I just said that the purpose of the language was to express the world adequately -- no claim that the world so expressed is or is not odd. << 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. What if we create a word that's very hard to describe in English? And make it a short word with a grammar that permits it to be used commonly? >> I'm not sure I see the connection between my note and your comment. What is the role of this word? Is it to describe something within the worldview or is it to force a worldview change. If the former, then we will manage it; if the latter it is 1) not a real part of the language and 2) will (consequently?) fail. None of this has much to do with {lo'e} which, in the official sense properly understood, has a perfectly familiar and useful role to play -- and one that we intuitively know how to work with. The problem comes when it gets gussied up with dubious metaphysics and epistemology and turned every which way at once, so that it is no longer not merely clear but not even as fuzzy as it was originally -- nor on the same track at all. None of things you and xorxes have proposed -- insofar as they are intelligible at all (which is minimal) -- have anything to do with the linguistic role the expressions are to play at either a practical or a theoretical level, and certainly do not lend themselves to unpacking for logical or semantic purposes, since they involve concepts outside the range of available ones in those fields (and, I would say, metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology as well -- leaving only hermeticism and schizophrenia for sources). |