Re: [lojban] No Italy

[Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

Yanis Batura wrote:
> I wonder why there is no gismu for Italy/Italian while there are 
> {jordo}, {filso}, {libjo}, {lubno}. I think Italians can provide 1000 
> times more Lojbanists than the countries pertaining to the latter four 
> gismu.

Arguably you could make a lujvo from latmo (and indeed that was our idea 
at the time).

The answer to your question is that Italy does not speak one of the 6 
source languages, whereas the four you mentioned do.  Based solely on 
cultural neutrality, it was difficult to find a reason NOT to make a 
gismu for any country with a substantial number of Arabic speakers, 
especially since Arabic qualified as one of our 6 languages only by 
counting the speakers in the many different countries that spoke the 
language.

If you want to be really culturally obtuse, you could call Italian 
"eastern-Spanish", since we almost counted Italian as a dialect of 
Spanish for weighting purposes in the language populations %^)

Or you can make a fu'ivla, which has been the idea ever since we worked 
out a system for fu'ivla lujvo.

lojbab