Re: BEGINNER'S QUESTION: internal sumti

[Nick Summers <nsummers@hutch.com.au>]

R.M. Uittenbogaard wrote:

> As you may already know, tanru are always ambiguous - by definition!

Rene has cleared up some further significant tanru-related points; the
most interesting I think relates to my understanding of (lojban)
metaphora.

I had been thinking of _metaphors_ in the context of my natural language
english, i.e. "The figure of speech in which a name or descriptive term
is transferred to some object to which it is not properly
applicable...". (soed, 1964) It seems that for tanru this defintion does
not hold strictly true. It may be more accurate for lujvo (though since
the lujvo is directly derived from the root words of the tanru this may
not be so; does a (possibly subtle) change-of-meaning occur in lujvo
formation?).

tanru seem to be conjunctions of root words (agglutinations) used when
the root gismu are insufficient to express a certain concept. Nobody
speaking english would consider < big house > a metaphor, but clearly <
barda zdani > is a valid lojban tanru. The ambiguity of the less obvious
tanru (eg. < gerku zdani > (dog-type-of house)...[...the dog was seen by
the daughter of Bill Clinton, who lives in the white house]) and their
possible (mis-) interpretaions probably most closely fulfils the "...is
not properly applicable..." of the above defintion. Perhaps it is an
error of terminology; 'metaphora' for want of something more accurate? I
will in future simply use 'tanru'.

I had been wondering how to string together concepts that expressed more
complex ideas (but which did not strike me as metaphoric), but had been
stumped by my implicit equation of the term metaphora with metaphor.
Taking them as not-exactly-equatable terms clarifies this considerably.
In this context, "That is a
talker.to.you.about.beautiful.things-salesperson" and "That's a
salesperson who talks to you about beautiful things" both make perfect
sense and follow naturally from the original example in the grammar. But
are there any conventions for defining strings of words constituting a
tanru? Any start/end markers or joining words? Can I just go adding
words together: 'a big blue dilapidated old wooden Georgian house'?

Both Robert J. Chassell and Rene Uittenbogaard have mentioned this very
useful formula for interpreting tanru...

X(tanru.part-one) Y(tanru.part-two)
  X-type-of Y
    (the inverse of the < co > construct for inverting tanru)

...which I think eases the task of interpretation considerably. (And
thanks Rene for the tanru-part.names; I had been wondering how to refer
to them.)

I hope this helps somebody other than me.

> > Can someone shed some light on this for me?
>
> I hope I have.

Thanks for the light shed. (Interpret _that_ as you will!)

Nick

> "the sky is the limit of your imagination" when interpreting tanru.

How would you translate "the sky is the limit of your imagination"?