User:Gleki/Tlön, Uqbar and la gleki's fishy apples: Difference between revisions

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{{jbocre/en}}''Written by '''[[User:Gleki|la gleki]]''''':
#REDIRECT [[Tlön, Uqbar and la gleki's fishy apples]]
 
What I state is that there are no objects (in linguistic sense). Do they exist in reality is of no matter to me. What is an apple? It's not an object. It's just a combination of properties.
 
Something smooth+red+round+tasty => apple.
 
In order to make this even more clear let's assume you close your eyes and someone puts a slice of something salty in your mouth. You <u>taste</u> it. You are sure it's a piece of a fish. You say "It's a fish".
 
Now open your eyes. Now you <u>see</u> that it's an apple. Whaat?? An apple that tasted of fish? Yes. And yes, that's unusual.
 
Now you would probably be shocked. You'll definitely try to invent a new word for this apple as it's not a true apple. You'll probably call it "fishy apple".
 
This is where fuzzy logic starts. I don't think I would call a brown apple '''cribe''' just because it shares some properties with bears (namely, the color). Although I wouldn't object much if you decide otherwise.
 
However, what I state is that humans can't perceive such continuum. They need fixed combinations of time/space/property. They call such combination "objects".
 
There is a legend that the Indians could not see Christopher Columbus' ships as they approached just because they didn't perceive such strange combinations of properties as objects. They obviously had no words for "ships". They had to learn to understand such things. The same can be said about UFOs. In Middle Ages people called them "angels". We call them "alien  ships". Camera thinks otherwise. One needs to get clear understanding what's going on to convert a number of properties into an "object=combination of properties".
 
And of course one needs to read the story [http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius] to get full understanding what it means to have words for such combinations of properties as {{tq|the sun and the water on a swimmer's chest, the vague tremulous rose color we see with our eyes closed, the sensation of being carried along by a river and also by sleep.}}
 
When you come home and hear someone scratching against your door (whether it's a hypothetical situation or you hear it every day when you come home) it's the same object '''da'''. More precisely '''da sraku'''. However, even if you have two animals at home each of whom can scratch it'll be the same '''da''' every day. '''da''' doesn't need to distribute over real individuals. '''da''' just has the property of scratching. It can magically transform from a dog into a cat. That's how '''da mlatu ca/fau [de=lo nu da sraku]''' (where '''de''' is a world/situation) works.
 
= Three types of languages =
There are 3 types of languages in the world: object languages, property languages and process languages.
 
The verb "to be" can be split into two in certain Romance languages. For example, the Spanish "ser" vs "estar." This permanent vs temporary sort of difference might be expressed in Lojban by the abundance of aspects and tenses, but what is really important that [[SWH|Sapir-Whorf hypothesis]] is clearly shown here. If some Native Americans call river "flowing of water" it is indeed a process. It's the same as if you start pouring water from a kettle. Likewise, the river might've started flowing thousands of years ago and might stop one day due to tectonic process for example.
 
In property languages instead of "Moon" one has to say something like "bright yellow high round".
 
In object languages people divide the world into
#objects that
#exist or do not exist
 
Lojban shouldn't force people to use either philosophy.
 
 
==Addendum==
One of the imagined languages of Tlön lacks [[noun]]s. Its central units are "impersonal [[verb]]s qualified by monosyllabic [[suffix]]es or [[Prefix (linguistics)|prefix]]es which have the force of [[adverb]]s." Borges lists a Tlönic equivalent of "The moon rose above the water": ''hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö'', meaning literally "Upward behind the onstreaming it mooned". ([[Andrew Hurley (academic)|Andrew Hurley]], one of Borges's translators, wrote a fiction in which he says that the words "axaxaxas mlö" "can only be pronounced as the author's cruel, mocking laughter".<ref>Andrew Hurley, [http://www.themodernword.com/borges/Zahir_and_I.html The Zahir and I], The Garden of Forking Paths, part of TheModernWorld.com. Accessed 3 August 2006.</ref>) In another language of Tlön, "the basic unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic [[adjective]]," which, in combinations of two or more, are noun-forming: "moon" becomes "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky."
 
Through describing the languages of Tlön, the story also plays with the [[epistemology|epistemological]] question of how language influences what thoughts are possible. The story also contains several metaphors for the way ideas influence reality. This last theme is first explored cleverly, by way of describing physical objects being willed into existence by the force of imagination, but later turns darker, as fascination with the idea of Tlön begins to distract people from paying adequate attention to the reality of [[Earth]].
 
==Further reading==
*[[jbocre:_Bear_goo|Bear goo]]
*[[BPFK_Section:_sensory_gismu|sensory gismu]]
*[[ELG: Subjunctives in detail]]
==References==
<references/>

Latest revision as of 09:38, 19 October 2017

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