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[lojban-beginners] Re: baxso
Michael wrote:
During the course of history contries appear and disappear, fuse
together and spread apart.
Federations, empires and unions arise. Shouldn't Lojban use cmene for
countries and their aspects?
Yes and no.
But JCB argued that Zipf's Law required the most commonly used words and
expressions to be shortened, and therefore assigned gismu to a haphazard
collection of languages/cultures/people (Loglan uses three different
gismu differing only in the final letter for these, an inconsistency in
the language rules).
To systematize things while making minimal change, I used the 12 most
spoken languages, and the major countries in which those languages are
natively spoken, and then added Latin, Greek and Hebrew because they
were classically important. Bahasa Malay/Indonesian is one of the 12.
The intent was that other "culture words" would be created as needed
using the fu'ivla rules, under which cmene are first made, and then if
usage warrants, a type III fu'ivla (with a semantic affix), and then
eventually a type IV fu'ivla with no affix. Later, in response to
demand, we came up with the concept of a particular fu'ivla form that
could experimentally be made into lujvo.
> I mean human, air, earth, trees animals
and other things will exist (well, not forever, but at least as long
as lojban is useful to people;) ), but countries undergo changes.
Countries change their names, cultures etc. Ancient Egyption culture
and language has nothing to do with modern. Roman empire turned into
modern Italy.
The latter is arguable. Latin turned into the Romance languages, and
indeed, I have proposed using "neo-Latin" as the basis for a lujvo for
the Romance language family. The Roman empire split, and the surviving
eastern empire outlasted the fall of Rome.
> The gismo reflecting some specific ountry or a nation
may need modification, and the older version would be necessary to be
able to speak about the former country. Think of Yugoslavia and its
republics. Would you define something Yugoslavian as Macedonian and
vice versa? Or partialy. It's complicated.
We've already had to deal with this, in that the referent of softo
arguably doesn't exist any more. But the word is still useful for
discussion of history and culture and will continue to be, indefinitely.
lojbab