From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Tue Apr 17 09:10:37 2007 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:10:37 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1HdqGK-0003Az-OY for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:10:37 -0700 Received: from phma.optus.nu ([166.82.175.165] helo=ixazon.dynip.com) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1HdqGA-0003Ak-SG for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:10:36 -0700 Received: from chausie (unknown [192.168.7.4]) by ixazon.dynip.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id B4071CE88B for ; Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:10:08 -0400 (EDT) From: Pierre Abbat To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Lojban geography and cultures Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:10:00 -0400 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.1 References: <1189A858F8918F43BE3F9C7603C73FB4031E7C9E@0456-its-exmp01.us.saic.com> In-Reply-To: <1189A858F8918F43BE3F9C7603C73FB4031E7C9E@0456-its-exmp01.us.saic.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-15" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200704171210.01471.phma@phma.optus.nu> X-Spam-Score: -2.3 X-Spam-Score-Int: -22 X-Spam-Bar: -- X-archive-position: 4277 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: phma@phma.optus.nu Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners On Tuesday 17 April 2007 07:28, Turniansky, Michael wrote: > I've always assumed that xinjda would be Hinduism, no? The cultural > gismu are very broad. For example, I'm sure Israeli Muslims and > Christians wouldn't like being lumped together in "xebro" along with > "Judaism", but there you are. There is no cultural gismu for Italian > (although talno has been proposed), with 58 million and yet there is one > for Palestinian with less than million people. Lack of cultural bias? > No, that's an almost-meaningless catchphrase thrown around the lojban > community (and inherited from loglan). What it really means in terms of > neutrality is that the grammar allows you the flexibility to express > things in any number of grammatical ways, reflecting the grammar of a > huge variety of natural languages (and many ore ways not reflective of > any natural language), and that the wordstock did not come from any > single language or language family, but is a blending of languages > spoken by billions of people, thereby obscuring any cultural bias in > word choice. The vocabulary itself, on the other hand, makes choices on > what it can say easily and what it can't. (Why is there a native word > (gismu) for lions, tigers, and elephants, but none for zebras, rhinos, > or hippo (or antelope, but I suppose some would argue "mirli" can be > used for that)? Why for rat and mouse and rabbit, but not squirrel or > raccoon (or even "rodent" in general)? Why for rose and tulip, but not > for daisy or lily? Etc. etc.) Everything comes down to choices made by > the language creators, and as such, represents a bias of some sort or > other. So I don't personally speak of lojban as "culturally-neutral" > except when it comes to the grammar and word sources. Period. lo antilope na mirli. The zebra is tirxyxi'a, hippo is ri'erxi'a (even though it isn't a horse), and for rhino how about zbijirnymabru? squirrel is ricyratcu, raccoon is either prokiono or lumge'u. What bothers me is that there are two gismu in Anseriformes, two in Galliformes, but no official gismu at all in Passeriformes, which is by far the largest order of birds. There's an unofficial gismu {korvo} for crow; it's the only one I know offhand. Several languages use the same word for "Jewish" and "Hebrew". In Lojban we can use x2 to distinguish them. For "Israeli" I think {sraeli} is a good word. I think there are too few chemical gismu. Chemical nomenclature is more jvokai than biological nomenclature, so biology can get by with lots of fu'ivla for naming species, but chemistry needs rafsi such as "-ane", "-ase" (for which I proposed {zmase}), "per-", and "di-". It uses numbers in two ways. E.g. 4,4-dichloro 1,1-diphenyl 3,3,3-trichloroethane. The numerals mean which atom something is attached to; the prefixes mean how many of them are attached. There is no rafsi for {boi}. {vonvonrelkliru pavypavyrelbenzo cibycibycibycibykliryxetli} is all wrong, even if such gismu existed, because it says that there are 3333 chlorines. Pierre