Semantics of archetypes

[finlay]

- Are marbles balls?

- Is cereal a soup?

Feel free to answer/vote, and to ask similar questions.

[Pabappa]

Marbles are balls, yes. I wouldnt call them sports balls, but theyre balls the way anything spherical is.

Cereal is not soup because a dry cereal is still a cereal, and a dry soup is not a soup.

[akam chinjir]

Does a glass house have windows?

[Linguoboy]

Does a glass house have windows?

If there are parts of it which open enough to allow air to enter but cannot be used as doors, I'd call those "windows".

[zompist]

Does a glass house have windows?

Plenty of modernist buildings, such as offices, can be considered glass houses. I think everybody calls the walls-of-glass between the office and the outside windows.

Maybe this is helped by the fact that in an actual interior, furniture will be grouped to frame portions of the glass wall, making them feel like windows.

[masako]

Does a glass house have windows?

If there are parts of it which open enough to allow air to enter but cannot be used as doors, I'd call those "windows".

It's almost like that's the definition of the word or something.

[KathTheDragon]

Does a glass house have windows?

If there are parts of it which open enough to allow air to enter but cannot be used as doors, I'd call those "windows".

It's almost like that's the definition of the word or something.

Not all windows open, though.

[finlay]

Does a glass house have windows?

If there are parts of it which open enough to allow air to enter but cannot be used as doors, I'd call those "windows".

It's almost like that's the definition of the word or something.

Simmer down, this is literally the topic of the thread. That things aren't so easy to define

[bradrn]

- Are marbles balls?

- Is cereal a soup?

Feel free to answer/vote, and to ask similar questions.

I agree with Pabappa: yes to the first, no to the second.

Does a glass house have windows?

Yes it does. The fact that the whole house is covered in windows is irrelevant (to me at least). Actually, I’d say that even a greenhouse has windows.

[Linguoboy]

Does a glass house have windows?

Plenty of modernist buildings, such as offices, can be considered glass houses. I think everybody calls the walls-of-glass between the office and the outside windows.

I agree for offices, but not for greenhouses. To me, those are panes and only if some of them are on frames which can be pushed out or otherwise shifted to allow the passage of air would I call them "windows".

(And I'm well aware that some "windows" don't open--that's been true of every library where I've ever worked. So I think we're probably looking at a radial category here. The prototypical window does open, but that's not going to be true of every member of the category of "windows".)

[malloc]

Marbles are certainly balls. Cereal is definitely not soup, however. Soups are savory rather than sweet and cooked in some way.

[Linguoboy]

Marbles are certainly balls. Cereal is definitely not soup, however. Soups are savory rather than sweet and cooked in some way.

Fruit soups are a thing in Nordic, Baltic, and German cuisine and they are sweet, not savoury. And nothing prevents cereals from being savoury; most of the world doesn't have dessert for breakfast like we do.

[malloc]

Marbles are certainly balls. Cereal is definitely not soup, however. Soups are savory rather than sweet and cooked in some way.

Fruit soups are a thing in Nordic, Baltic, and German cooking and they are sweet, not savoury. And nothing prevents cereals from being savoury; most of the world doesn't have dessert for breakfast like we do.

Well ok. I probably should have clarified that I was speaking based on my own culture and dialect.

[Pabappa]

i just found this which shows how cereal could be considered soup so long as it has milk in it. I wonder if maybe the original poster has seen this too?

I would consider myself to be in either the top left corner or the top center .... only saying top center because I dont think meat is required.

The reason I found that picture is because I've seen this similar one a few times which does the same thing but for sandwiches. In the case of sandwiches, Im on the bottom left .... I know what it has to taste like, but I dont care much about the shape ... after all, open face sandwiches exist, and are not much different than pizza in terms of how theyre put together.

edit: i guess i could see calling cereal a soup if its a bowl of hot oatmeal ... but when I think of cereal I think of something cold with milk, ... i would just call oatmeal "oatmeal".

[Kuchigakatai]

- Are marbles balls?

Yes.

- Is cereal a soup?

Now that is one of those "if you stretch the definition a bit then yes" type of questions.

Feel free to answer/vote, and to ask similar questions.

Is an interior plant a type of decoration?

Is a house a box?

Is a prism-shaped, multi-floor office building a box?

Is the surface of a body of water a mirror?

Is a stool a chair?

Is a sword a knife?

Is a computer window a window?

Is a computer bug a bug?

Is a computer program a program?

Is Pluto a planet?

Is snowy weather a type of rain?

Is Mecislau the greatest a-posteriori conlanger the ZBB ever saw?

Is cedh audmanh the greatest conlanger the Akana games ever saw?

Is H13 a crab?

Was finlay a Hindu god?

Was Nortaneous a magician?

Is Linguoboy a sullen cat?

Was Salmoneus a reptile?

Was pthag at the right hand of the Father?

Is WeepingElf a weeping elf?

Was the Pole a pole?

Was Radius Solis a ray of Sun, proceeding from his father Helios/Zontas?

Was Torco a torco (a pothole) or a terco (a stubborn man)?

Was zompist in the den?

Is picking up tiramisu like picking up tiramisù?

Shakespeare once said, ser, o no ser, esa es la pregunta. Am I the question?

Is an imp a goblin?

Is a troll a goblin?

Is Trump a goblin?

Is Biden a goblin?

Was what Willy Clinton had with Monica Lengüisky sexual relations?

Was Jeffrey Epstein's death a suicide?

Is book piracy piracy?

Is book piracy theft?

Is protecting your publishing company as an inherent part of the social aspect of the academic world for professors to progress or simply stay in their field, so that even though an academic's research may be fully funded from public money, peer reviewers get paid nothing or what you could metaphorically call McDonald's coupons, and little or none of the profits of the publication ever get to reach her or him, or her or his department, all in established legality, theft?

Is a 500-page-long reference grammar of a natlang a bible?

Is Tim Converse and Joyce Park's PHP Bible (1st ed., 2000) a bible?

Is a bible a manual for one's life?

Is a church a temple?

Is an unaltered forested corner where a coven of Wiccans regularly meet to pray and sing a shrine?

Is a boddhisattva in Mahayana Buddhism a god?

Is a religion where at least one god exists but no such being ever does anything and are therefore not worth thinking about, like Deism or Epicureanism, a theistic religion?

Is either of a monotheist or an oligotheist, denying the existence of most gods, an atheist?

Is Western spiritual-but-not-religious Spirituality a religion?

Is Western Buddhism atheism?

Is a god a spirit?

Is a god part of God?

If, during Passover, an Orthodox Jewish family has properly taken care of removing all leaven inside, but on the fourth day they see a mouse nearby that may or may not have entered carrying a piece of leavened bread inside through a certain hole at the back, is it a family worth cutting off from Israel in accordance to Exodus 12:14-20?

If I'm directing a trolley bus going downwards at a violent speed and I have a choice between magically running over and killing baby Stalin on the left and baby Hitler on the right in the past in all other dimensions of the multiverse except this one, with no one ever able to believe me I have done this unless I tell them (after which they become 100% convinced) and while I'm in full awareness of this fact, is either decision I take a crime?

[Pabappa]

Okay wow thats a lot. But two questions caught my eye:

Is Pluto a planet?

No, although I dont like the way they did it .... how a "dwarf planet" is not a planet. Astronomer Mike Brown rationalizes this by saying that a seahorse is not a horse .... but that's not quite the same thing in my mind, since seahorses are part of a whole different environment.

Is Tim Converse and Joyce Park's PHP Bible (1st ed., 2000) a bible?

Ive always disliked this use of the word "bible". It used to offend me, because I said that there was only one Bible, ... now it doesnt offend me but I dont think I'll ever get rid of the instinctive reaction.

[bradrn]

Feel free to answer/vote, and to ask similar questions.

Is an interior plant a type of decoration?…

Let’s see… yes, sometimes, sometimes, sometimes (if still enough), no, no, no, no, yes (but it’s not a programme), yes, yes, ???, ???, ???, ???, ???, ???, ???, ???, ???, ???, ???, ???, ???, ???, sometimes, no, ???, ???, ???, ???, no, that’s a tricky question, that one’s also tricky, no, no, yes, no, yes, ???, ???, definitely not, possibly, ???, not in any Judaism I know of, what sort of strange world do you live in where you have to make a decision like that‽

[zompist]

A lot of Ser's examples relate to prototype theory, or metaphor. As with windows, things can belong to a category without being good examples of that category. And most common words are not understood via dictionary definitions; the idea that a word is a class with thick boundaries given by a strict dictionary is a folk theory belonging only to educated elites.

A few comments, just for fun.

Is a house a box?
Is a prism-shaped, multi-floor office building a box?

Brutalist buildings are often called boxes. But the prototypical box is small and moveable.

Is the surface of a body of water a mirror?

No big paradoxes here. It's not prototypical because it's not portable or indeed very useful, but a painter or a physicist could easily refer to it as a mirror.

Is a stool a chair?

These are kind of Gricean categories. That is, it's hard to define "chair" in a way that excludes stools; but when we have a common word that's a better fit for an object, we should use it rather than the generic term.

Is a sword a knife?

Only if you ignore the functions of things. Neither of these things is just "a thing that cuts". What it cuts is important.

(I'd also note that cultures that actually use edged weapons are likely to have several terms, creating a stool/chair situation. They'd likely be amazed at a time traveler who called them all swords.)

Is a computer window a window?
Is a computer bug a bug?
Is a computer program a program?

Once a metaphor has become a new sense of the word, these are not much more than puns. Is the head of a nail a head? Yes, that is one of the senses of the word "head". This can be a little amusing but it doesn't confuse anyone.

Is Pluto a planet?

If people call it a planet, it's a planet.

If a language academy redefined "planet", linguists would hardly care. Why should we care more if a scientific group does so? We don't accept their guidance when they try to redefine words like "work", "bug", or "fish".

(Of course, specialists in a field may well use technical terms rigorously. That's part of language, but not normative for non-specialists. And as we saw with names of aspects, there can be different senses even in the same field.)

Is a church a temple?

No, but this points to a nice semantic gap: we don't have a common word for "place of worship". It could easily have been "temple", but for some reason we just don't use it that way.

Is a boddhisattva in Mahayana Buddhism a god?

Sure. "God" would be a fun word to analyze in more detail; I think it'd quickly be clear it's more like Wittgenstein's "game" than like, say, "rabbit". Dictionary definitions here tend to be terrible.

[bradrn]

A lot of Ser's examples relate to prototype theory, or metaphor. As with windows, things can belong to a category without being good examples of that category. And most common words are not understood via dictionary definitions; the idea that a word is a class with thick boundaries given by a strict dictionary is a folk theory belonging only to educated elites.

A few comments, just for fun.

Is a house a box?
Is a prism-shaped, multi-floor office building a box?

Brutalist buildings are often called boxes. But the prototypical box is small and moveable.

Alright then, here’s an interesting one: is a shipping crate a box?

Is a stool a chair?

… it's hard to define "chair" in a way that excludes stools …

No it isn’t: ‘A chair is an item of furniture which is used for sitting on, fits one person, and has a back’.

[priscianic]

Is a stool a chair?

… it's hard to define "chair" in a way that excludes stools …

No it isn’t: ‘A chair is an item of furniture which is used for sitting on, fits one person, and has a back’.

I have a friend who has an ergonomic kneeling chair: there's a seat that's slightly tilted forward that you sit on, two lower pads raised off the ground that you put your knees on (such that you end up in a kneeling position, but raised off the ground), and no back...I'm pretty sure it's a chair, not so sure whether it's a stool.