Ryan Gray wrote:
Hi! I am new to Lojban and find it a fascinating concept. This is my first time posting to this group. I have also have a question. What are the Lojban translation for various political terms. The reason I ask is that "conservative" in Russia means a very different thing from "conservative" in the United States. Likewise, Thomas Jefferson was considered a "liberal" in his day even though his views would be VERY different those of from someone like Teddy Kennedy. Today, many would say Thomas Jefferson would be closer to being libertarian than either conservative or liberal. I would think that a logical language such as Lojban would have more precise wordsfor these ideas.
Whatever the words are for political beliefs, Lojban should probably have a lot more of them, allowing for conveying distinction between positions.
There is no reason to believe that the same word would be used for all usages of English "conservative" or even English "libertarian" (since I've gathered there is a distinction between Ayn Rand's positions, those of the Libertarian Party, and the positions of Thomas Jefferson (who probably could not correctly be classified using ANY modern terms, especially since his positions changed on some issues over his lifetime).
In expressing in Lojban, my advice is to not make much of an attempt to fit the categorizations present in other languages, and indeed to avoid categorization at all. X1 takes political position X2 under conditions X3 seems like the basic predicate, and X2 is probably best kept specific to issues. Another basic predicate might be X1's position on issues is informed by ideology/political philosophy(ies) X2 under conditions X3, and then you have a basis for coining predicates to describe specific ideological or philosophical positions using whatever traits seem most significant to you. "smallest-government-belief" seems like one possibility applicable to libertarians, "free-market-decide-belief" is another. By decomposing the concepts individually, you can deal with issues where one concept conflicts with another, leading to differences in political position.
lojbab