Re: VL-TRANS: a favorite saying Saul Epstein Wed, 22 Oct 1997 08:26:28 -0500 At 10:12 PM 10/21/97 -0500, Rob wrote: >At 03:55 PM 10/21/97 -0500, Saul wrote: >>At 02:45 PM 10/21/97 -0500, Rob wrote: >> >>>Same thing in E-Prime: >>> >>>If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps _this >>>occurs_ because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to >>>the music which he hears however measured or far away. >> >>What pace? What drummer? What music? What distance? > >Metaphorical of course, as in the original, mine just eliminates >that ambiguous little pest, the "is of" identity. > >>>An unambiguous grammer does not imply a lack of gratuitous >>>metaphors. The fact that Thoreau did not refer to an existant >>>drummer or music does not mean the language to express such an >>>utterance must have ambiguous grammatical rules. >> >>Why "gratuitous?" Thoreau's metaphor lifts this above the rather >>pedestrian observation that people are different and should express >>that difference. > >Just "Spocking" out for a second there. From a strictly >effiency stand point, one can express the message message >without the metaphors. Metaphorical speech adds to the >informational content only an emotional overtone. Which only >seems useful in terms of persuation. Which works for humans, >but why would a Vulcan need an emotional overtone to convince? > >In the case of poetry, it adds a different dimension, but >still it seems an emotion or non-rational one. Not that >I regard that as bad, but in English we use metaphors so >much people get lost in spooks sometimes talking about >metaphorical "things" as if they were existential "things". Efficiency intersects both honor and shame... I guess I'm reminded as much as anything of Zen Koans, which have always seemed to me to warn against too much trust in any particular logic, to ask the listener how long it has been since she really thought about what she knows and how she knows it, to recognize that there are always unexamined possibilities each of which has its own logic and some of which may be well-suited to the tasks of living. And of course to remember that logic is only the beginning of wisdom... Poetry, even of a less-advanced sort, chases particular alternative logics to learn from them, or just to practice. The key is that it doesn't privilege what has been known over what has not been known -- or as you might put it, the "existent" over the "metaphorical." The pressure of memory takes care of that. But that by no means requires that the Vulcan language include any particular feature. >>That tends to refer to the possibility of sentences with >>indeterminate subjects, or over-use of pronouns till one can >>no longer determine who did what, or deictic confusion... > >Hmmm..,Saul somewhere after "That", I lost you. Sorry. I just meant that grammatical ambiguity usually refers to sentences constructed so that there is no way to tell exactly what role some of the participants play. Having the well-defined case and deixis systems that it has will go a long way towards protecting Vulcan from that. >>All I was originally saying is that natural languages are ambiguous, >>because you seemed to be saying that Vulcan shouldn't be. > >Well, I did mean that, but I was not thinking of poetry, >so I guess we must leave room for metaphor. However, I don't >think we have to have an ambiguous grammer or semantics >to do it. > >I agree all natural languages suffer from ambiguity. I think >that after the Reformation that Vulcans would have reformed >their language, at least a bit. Yes. My imagination of history gives pre-Reformation language an inambiguous voice designed for special purposes which, post-Reformation, attained much greater importance and was extended for broader use. There was probably a time when among the sages only K'dvarin taught without it. >I see no reason why we cannot have a totally logical mode of >Vulcan in which one simply cannot form untrue sentances. And >a more metaphorical mode in which one can speak of imaginary >things. And, since I think I suggested that first, I obviously see no reason why we can't have two such modes either. I will simply find it interesting to discover if we really can separate them that way. But I am not at all opposed to trying, nor will I obstruct such efforts. Let's get the thing built, and THEN we can argue about what the end result can or cannot express. -- from Saul Epstein liberty uit net www johnco cc ks us sepstein "Surak ow'pha:per the's'hi the's'cha'; the's'pha:dzhar the's'hi surakecha'." -- K'dvarin Ursw~l'at