Unique Names

["brandon_wirick" <bwirick@calpoly.edu>]

Name uniqueness has been a classic problem, because certainty about a
name's uniqueness requires long names, which is silly for
conversations of few people. The whole idea behind hash-tables is that
large numbers can be efficiently represented by smaller numbers if not
all numbers are being used for a given domain. We already do this with
names to a degree, (e.g. "Did you go to John's party?" "John who?"
"John Doe." "Oh, no, I went to John Johnson's party.") but I imagine
that Lojban would be perfect for making conventions like this that
really work.

I imagine that cmene will be unofficial in the same way that websites
are unofficial. To register a website, one selects a top-level domain
(e.g. com, org, net, etc.) and picks a domain name that has not yet
been picked for that TLD, so it can be unique without being very
regulated. In the same way, there can be many "lojbo cmene tutra,"
analogous to the Web's TLDs, and people could register groups of cmene
under whichever ones they want (some might become more popular than
others), and the owner of each group of cmene could specify as many
unique cmene under that group as desired. This could be the next
generation of jbovlaste or something.