Subscribe to Blog via Email
Archive:
Day: October 11, 2016
Why do some words come across as more clichéd than others?
Most metaphors, we’d like to assume, were new once. (Likely not all of them: cognitive metaphor is tied up with cognition.) Some new metaphors, or figurative speech, or just plain collocations, become popular. Others do not. Some of those popular collocations become so popular, they become entirely conventional and characteristic of a genre. And in […]
What is the hardest concept to understand in Lojban?
Three candidates. Lexical aspect: the distinction between achievement, accomplishment, activity and state it took from Vendler. It’s not inherently inscrutable, but rattling off Vendler’s nomenclature is not the way to make people understand it. The shades of difference between abstractors: nu, du’u, sedu’u, ka, su’u. The distinctions are real, but they are more confusing, and […]