Re: TECH: Figurative speech: a minor change proposal

[Mr Andrew Rosta <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

John Cowan writes:
> The proposal is to abandon this grammatical separation, and make both "pe'a"
> and "po'a" regular members of UI.  The intention is to then separate them
> semantically.  "pe'a" would be assigned to poetic metaphor, whereas "po'a"
> would be used for semantic extension.
>
> All UI cmavo can be negated with "-nai", giving a polar negation.  "pe'anai"
> would mean "literal no matter how absurd", and "po'anai" would mean
> "a semantic restriction even though it looks like an extension".
>
> In addition, both "pe'a" and "po'a" would be given rafsi, -pev- and -pov-
> respectively, to allow the creation of figurative lujvo.  A lujvo beginning
> with pev- might have a totally erratic place structure.
>
> Comments?

This is a most appealing idea. But I'm not sure that incorporating these
into lujvo is quite the right strategy: once a lujvo is learnt & commited
to memory one would have no need for these rafsi. Rather, I would
advocate a method of getting these cmavo to apply to lujvo in 2 ways:

i. in the same way as they apply to gismu, or any other word (i.e. normal
   way)
ii. as if the lujvo were expanded into a tanru, so that pe'a and po'a
    become comments on the aptness of the component rafsi (especially
    the word-final one) to the actual sense of the lujvo.

(ii) might be used when teaching the standard grammatical term "lebyvalsi",
for example, since although the meaning is fixed, & is usually used
literally, the component rafsi (specifically, the first) is a bit on the
counterintuitive side.

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And.