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[lojban] valsi klesi (was Re: Deutschland)

On Saturday 10 November 2007 18:36, komfo,amonan wrote:


Some folks, myself included, are uncomfortable with the cultural gismu --
they seem to elevate  a couple dozen cultures above all the others. (And
yes I know I use them, but within a year or so I'll probably dispense with
their use entirely.)


Quoting Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>:
There are also cultural lujvo and cultural fu'ivla: labru'o, dizdo'o, berdo'o, 
brodo'o, mraigo, katlana, skalduna, bre'one, tce'exo, oksitano, oiltano,
tsakoni, to name several just in Europe.
In principle I agree that it's strange that some particular cultures have gismu, and it's certainly not how I would have done it. On the other hand I see no nonsymbolic harm to it: It's merely the difference between whether the resulting words are two or three syllables.
In Lojban every arrangement of consonant & vowel has word construction meaning embedded in it, has the whole history of the language embedded in it. I think we sometimes get so involved with that that we forget that it's just a clever way to put together the words of a language. In other languages, remember, the words for various cultures are two or three syllables and noone thinks twice about it!
The gismu list is historical & irrevocable, but it's just a text file. We get to decide utterance by utterance how we want to refer to things. It's our true openness to other cultures that will show through in how respectfully we are able to name them in our language. .i'i .o'a
In every aspect, not just its treatment of human cultures, the gismu space is necessarily merely an arbitrary collection. There's nowhere to go from there except to add more arbitrary collections, ones from our own cultures or our creativity. The space of 2 and 3 piece lujvo is enormous, room enough for many more collections of semantic ideas the size of the gismu list. To a fluent speaker, I imagine the gismu list would be mostly a set of mnenomics.
We haven't yet made the most important decisions about what it is easy or difficult to say in Lojban. What's easy to say in the language has much more to do with what the speech community is most familiar with, which has to do with how the language is taught. (At the moment the language isn't taught at all, which is why I say that the decisions remain unmade.)
If the way we teach and share our language makes it clear that all cultures are equally respected here, then historical morphological details will be just that. 

mi'e bret.



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