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From: Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] Biological taxonomy and other 'esoteric' vocabularies
 like  chemical nomenclature
Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2012 15:28:01 -0500
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All languages (except Latin itself, and maybe Greek from which many taxonomic 
roots come) treat biological taxonomic names the same way: they are marked as 
foreign (at least genus and species names) and (usually) undeclined. I know of 
two exceptions, virus species names and some unranked taxa of plants like 
rosids, both of which are in English, at least in English. Common names, such 
as English "geranium" and Lojban "plargoni", can be derived from (or in 
Romance languages, inherited from, such as Spanish "aves" and "avena") 
scientific names, but may not have the same taxonomic extent. 

Chemical nomenclature is a quite different beast. An IUPAC name of a 
complicated organic chemical is very much like a long lujvo, and very unlike 
the typical word formations of Indo-European and Semitic languages, which 
consist of a root, or a few roots joined together in IE, with a bunch of 
prefixes, suffixes, and inflections stuck on. I think, therefore, that IUPAC 
should be done with lujvo in Lojban. But there isn't much room left for all 
the affixes used in IUPAC. There are at least three ways numbers are used in 
IUPAC: the oxidation state or valence of an atom, the number of copies of a 
group in a molecule, and the atom to which a group is attached; and it's not 
clear to me how to distinguish them in Lojban. Take for instance 1,1,1-
trichloro-2,2-di(4-chlorophenyl)ethane (aka DDT). The numerals denote which 
atom the chlorines and phenyls are attached to; the "di" and "tri" prefixes 
mean there are three chlorines and two chlorophenyls attached to the ethane.

Pierre
-- 
Jews use a lunisolar calendar; Muslims use a solely lunar calendar.

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