Re: response to korant on loopholes

[cbmvax!uunet!mullian.ee.Mu.OZ.AU!nsn]

>To
>people from cultures with only two color words, Lojban will have multiple
>roots for the same color.  xlali (bad) and xamgu (good) have identical place
>structures, but are not hte same concept.  Can you say that to'erxamgu
>(the polar opposite of good) is identical in meaning to xlali?  I can't.

1. Not quite true that they'd see us talking about the same colour. People with less colour words than English (when one excludes French loans, Greek has only
six) can still distinguish the other colours; it's just that the don't see the
point in doing so. Don't extend Whorf to physiology, Bob! The attitude of such
people to Lojban words will be simply that they are making oversubtle 
distinctions, which is also our reaction to magenta and cyan as gismu.

As for the lojban {to'e}: it has been the experiencre of Esperanto that the 
language abhors synonyms, and distinctions between the un- form latent in the
language and the non-un- form introduced routinely evolve, initially stylisti-
cally, and later often also significantly semantically. But until now in
Esperanto, no equivalent to {xlali} has succeeded in ousting the equivalent
of {to'erxamgu}; indeed, one Esperantist has commented that the person who
introduces such an arbitrary neologism to replace one of the best established
compounds in the language is capable of murdering their own mother. In Esp,
to'erxamgu *is* xlali. So let's not try and anticipate semantic evolution too
much.

Nick.