Date: Sat, 17 Jul 93 17:43:09 EDT
From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
Message-Id: <9307172143.AA16126@grebyn.com>
To: nsn@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU
Subject: Re: gismu
Cc: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com
X-Mozilla-Status: 0011

New people tend to be more prone to changing the status quo than long timers
and  he's made clear he isn't adamant about them.  being that he IS from
Latin America and could be said to be sensitive to what attitudes would be
like down there where there are a lot of potential Lojbanists, I like to
let him have his say.  Of course it is sounding like Cowan agrees that we
should add what is needed to meet some arbitrary criteria, and He was thone who 
brought the issue up at the annual meeting, and has strongly pressed the Irish
cause.

Nora's point of view is that we do have a criterion explanation for Scotland
that justifies including it and not Ireland, England, etc.:  JCB had a gismu
for the one and not the others.  From her standpoint that is the only justifi-
cation we need to keep a gismu (it would also jsutify Italian, and Amerind
which I would generalize to aborigine, but no others - we kept Scotland of
the three because it was a country that spoke one of our languages, and Amerind
opened up the whole kettle of fish about aborigines of other kinds)
But we have a lot of other oddball gismu only because JCB had them, and had some
pretty strong criteria to delete ones that he had- we didn't keep gismu for
billiards, football, and believe it or not, ckafybarja.  But we did keep
banana and balcony.

I've looked over the reactions a bit more, and it seems that people aren;t
supporting every single culture manetioned in my report, just most of them.
Probably if all were added, perhaps 10-20 gismu.  I could live with it too,
but I need some strong sentiments, especially from the non-USA Lojbanists,
who have abetter shot at claiming cultural bias, to override Tommy's objections.

Hope you have a high tolerance for garbage in reading the Eaton files.

If I didn;t say so, try to keep the 'Eaton number' with those words you
do keep.  I eventually do want to cross index our lujvo into the list,
and figure we might as well not lose data.  I suspect that most of the other
data fields (who invented the word , for pete's sake, just isn't really of
interest to the average dictionary user, or even the rarest one - bett would be
a citation of how it was first used with a quoted text).

lojbab