From @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Thu Apr 22 20:26:42 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Fri, 23 Apr 1993 00:27:57 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 7285; Fri, 23 Apr 93 00:27:35 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 4458; Fri, 23 Apr 93 00:28:28 EST Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1993 00:26:42 -0400 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: TECH: Morocco, Lebanon, or Indonesia X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: OR Message-ID: There is no claim that the current mix of Lojban speakers has anywhere near a demographic sample of the world's speaker base, whereas the weightings that were used WAS balanced based on all the world's speakers. Presumably, if the eventual speaker base reflects world populations, Indonesia especially would represent a much more important topic of conversation, given its high population. I can argue much less strongly for the Islamic countries, because the high population of Arabic speakers is spread over such a large number of countries, that it can be claimed that the amount that Arabic s speakers will talk of a particular one of them is much lower (the same could be said of the large number of Spanish-speaking countries in 'Latin' America, and we perhaps should have given more of them cultural roots than we did, based on the Arabic precedent. But of course, there ARE more important Spanish- speaking countries and less-important ones, but it is much harder to decide which of the Arabic countries (besides Saudi Arabia, which is actually quite low in population) are important in any sense longer than this morning's news headlines. So, to be impartial, I set a population floor, and made gismu for all that I could, but allowed countries below a threshold to be omitted if they did not have an 'obvious' gismu, or the best choices conflicted with more important words. The ability to make easy borrowings of course made it easier for us to limit the cultural words, especially in cases where therewas a conflict with another root. But borrowings (le'avla) make poor compounds, and most of the cultural words are most useful in lujvo compunds. Perhaps our Australian readers might see more mention of Indonesia in the newspaper than those of us in the USA. If and when we get Lojbanists talking about the daily news (which admittedly almost none of us do at this point, for lack of major interest among other reasons), people will tend to want words for cultural-based compounds more than they do now. At this point, my strongest case seems to be in the use of the cultural gismu in distinguishing among currencies- one of the few areas where the cultural gismu HAVE been used in actually speech and writing (though only a few of them - sralo, brito, merko, kadno, and I think dotco and rusko have been used in compound with rupnu at some point). lojbab