From cowan Mon Dec 17 15:18:55 1990 Return-Path: Message-Id: From: cowan (John Cowan) Subject: Proposed new Lojban gismu To: lojban-list Date: Mon, 17 Dec 90 15:18:09 EST X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.2 PL13] Status: RO I would like to propose a new Lojban gismu (root word). The word belongs to the culture/nationality group, but represents another culture closely related to Lojbanistan's: Esperanto. Our current culture words reflect the 12 most widely spoken languages, the names of the countries that speak them, and a few other choices made for their wide inter-cultural use: Greek, Latin, Hebrew/Jewish, Islamic. The proposed word is "spero", meaning "x1 is Esperantist". There is no other gismu sufficiently like "spero" to cause a conflict; the nearest word is "stero", meaning "steradian" (a unit of solid angular measurement) and we already have minimal pairs distinguished by "sp" vs. "st", such as stali/spali. "Ranto" is not usable as a gismu, because we have "ranti" (soft). All culture words must end in "o" and must have a rafsi, since the whole point of a culture word is for use in lujvo. There are two reasonable rafsi: "pe'o" and "pro". Currently "pe'o" is assigned to "pendo" (friend) and "pro" is assigned to "fapro" (oppose). All other possible rafsi are assigned to words that have no other rafsi assignment. Three questions for this list: 1) Is the idea of a culture word for Esperanto sensible? 2) Is "spero" a suitable word? 3) Which is a better rafsi, "pe'o" or "pro"?