"philosophy" and vocabulary growth

[Esteban Flamini <eflamini@UNS.EDU.AR>]

> I like that place structure, but I don't see why to go to great lengths
> with "has the job of thinking about..." when there's no particular reason
> to imply actual employment.
[Lee Daniel Crocker]

> Going back to a previous comment: I don't think {jibri} necessarily
> entails gainful employment. A {jibri} can be any occupation,
> whether rented or not.
[Jorge Llambias]

I was taking 'jibri' in precisely that sense which does not necessarily
involve payment; the list of gismu gives 'occupation' and 'vocation' as
glosses for 'jibri'.

After I proposed 'cmupeiseljibri' I was thinking it over. I was trying to
translate "philosophy" by defining it. Maybe this is asking too much for a
word. In human languages words are supposed to refer to things, not to
define them. (The pretension of making the form of words express
unequivocally their meaning resembles too much that of eighteenth-century
philosophical languages, which were unsuccessful.) If the morphology of the
a word gives a hint of its meaning, so better; metaphorical lujvo will work.

> Philosophy in Mandarin Chinese is "zhe2 xue2".
> xue2 means study
> zhe2 means... "theory" according to a native speaker
>
> (the 2 indicates second tone... a rising tone, the spelling is
> pinyin romanization)
[qbradley@gulf.csc.UVic.CA]

A good point for a "tadnytadni"-like lujvo, isn't it?

BTW, I don't know too much Chinese, but as much as I know, it faces similar
troubles as Lojban when there's a need to coin new words; so it could be a
helpful model for Lojban.

I read that, e.g., Chinese for 'America' is 'a mei li ka' (the fu'ivla way);
for train it's 'hue che', fire-charriot (a metaphora) and for 'elevator' is
something like "up-down-machine", a metaphor too, but almost a definition.
(If I'm wrong please let me know).

(The development of written Chinese could be illuminating, as well. Complex
characters usually involve hard-to-recognize metaphors, so a reader could
not, as a rule, understand the meaning of a new character by analyzing it to
its components; that was what my "cmupeiseljibri" and other lujvo were
trying to do. The meaning of new characters must have been deliberately and
actively fixed... much as this list tries to do with new lujvo.)

Esteban Flamini