Re: [lojban] patronymics

[Rob Speer <rob@twcny.rr.com>]

On Sun, Oct 07, 2001 at 07:18:00PM -0400, Craig wrote:
> On the McDonald page on the wiki, a mention was made of the Book's
> suggestion that Mc always be mky. It seems to me that we can do better than
> that. I would like to suggest that we append the string "serir" onto the
> beginning of the name to make patronymic translations from any language.
> Thus McDonalds = la serirdAn,ldz. We can also use it as a replacement for
> the Russian -ovitch and -enva endings. THe idea is to provide a semantic
> hint about what the name means. I like doing that, and if I had it to do
> over again I would have been "la ro'is." from the beginning of my time in
> Lojbanistan.

This would only make sense if someone named "McDonald" was called
"Son-of-Donald" in English.

The sound of the name is much more important than the meaning in the
vast majority of cases. For example, very few people named "McDonald"
would actually be the son of Donald (since that would imply, in our
modern world where surnames stay constant, that his father would be
named "Donald McDonald".)

-- 
la rab.spir
noi sarji zo gumri