Date: Tue, 6 Sep 1994 00:55:11 -0400
From: Logical Language Group <lojbab>
Message-Id: <199409060455.AA28325@access3.digex.net>
To: rricci@axcrnc.cern.ch
Subject: Re:  culture/nationality gismu
Cc: lojbab@access.digex.net, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu
Status: RO

The cultural gismu is an old an much debated issue.  The cultures that were
made as gismu are those associated with the 12 most spoken languages in the
world, but there are some inconsistencies because I did the research on which
cultures to represent in a rather ad hoc manner.  Thus several Latin American
countries that met the criteria used for including Libya and Lebanon were
omitted.

The answer to your question is that you use a fu'ivla borrowing for those
cultures that do not have a gismu.  Borrowing word-space is virtually unlimited
as compared with the greatly constrained gismu space.  The 'penalty' is that
fu'ivla do not have short 'rafsi' forms, and thus the making of such words
is a bit more ad hoc.

I first note that the cmavo "me" can convert a name, or any other kind of
sumti, into a predicate with exactly the place struture you describe in
your post.  Turn "Italy" or "Italian" into a name of your choice and say
"me la .italian." and you have covered the problem the quick and easy way:
"x1 pertains to "Italian" in aspect x2"

To make Italian into a fu'ivla, you have to work only slightly harder.
BY convention (and to make the construction of ad hoc fu'ivla easy and
error-free), people generally prefix a fu'ivla with a 'classifier rafsi'
which gives a clue as to the nature of the borrowed word, in case it is not
recognized in its Lojban form.  Thus, from Italian, you might get
kulnr,talno (which I think has been used before) or kulnr,talano, etc.
Also bangr,talno for the language, gugdr,talno for the territorial country,
etc.

Now it turns out that you have another alternative, since "Latin" is the gismu
latmo.  When we made that gismu, it was suggested that people could make
a lujvo like cabna-latmo or cnino-latmo to convey the idea that Italy is the
modern remnant of the core of the Roman empire.  The only conflicting concept
is "Romance", the common term for all Latinate cultures in modern times, and
it seems likely that people could come up wioth distinguishing lujvo for 
Italian vs. Romance.

Hope this helps.

lojbab