[lojban] Re: The Lojban Wikipedia is up

[Pierre Abbat <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On Wednesday 11 August 2004 12:29, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 12:44:09AM -0400, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> > For instance, I just made up the word {jicyjutsi'o}, added it to
> > jbovlaste, and used it in [[finpe]] on Wikipedia. Hopefully someone
> > will write an article on it, which will explain it better than the
> > definition. (I'm not a cladist, so I'm probably not the one to write
> > the article.)
>
> That reminds me: I discovered that jimca isn't the best word for that
> sort of thing.  I was working on a word for "hierarchy" or "tree"
> (computer science sense).  First version was jicyci'e, but then I
> discovered vipsi.
>
> Talk about a word that doesn't get enough usage.
>
> vipsi does a *much* better job of expressing branching, hierachical
> relationships than jimca, IMO.
>
> Also IMO, cladistics is jutyvipske, but I'm hardly an expert on the
> topic.

I disagree. Cladistics is the idea that (using the example on the fish page) 
the lobe-finned fishes split into three branches: the coelacanths, the 
lungfish, and the tetrapods; and therefore any taxon containing the 
coelacanths and the lungfish must contain the tetrapods also. Both cladistic 
and phenetic taxonomy are hierarchical tree structures, but phenetic taxonomy 
has named hierarchical levels and can be done without assuming that branching 
occurred, whereas cladistics assumes branching and produces lots of clades 
with no taxonomic rank.

As to languages, I am a cladist, and linguistic taxonomy has unranked clades 
and continua (you can go from Monaco to Portugal, Wallonia, or Sicily and 
everyone understands his neighbors).

phma
-- 
li fi'u vu'u fi'u fi'u du li pa