[lojban] Getting serious about "Cultural" fi'uvla (was: You're doing it wrong)

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 14:27, Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hrm... I wonder about the best way to do this...
> On the one hand, it seems like they should be cmene, since they are, essentially, names.

.i go'i je'a .i ko'a cu cmene
yes, indeed they are names.

However fi'uvla grant the freedom to make universally regular five-letter rafsi (and then build better lujvo) AND to neutrally recognize all useful "cultures" while avoiding a trade-off with gismuspace. The sensible compromise is to make this list a reference for both cmene and fi'uvla. Also, this way we can talk about language and politics in lojban without having to write in awkWARD CAPital leTTErs.

http://www.lojban.org/tiki/cultural+fu'ivla

ta'o ni'o What is "culture" anyhow?

I want to define our specifications for this, so looked up the definition of culture (Mirriam-Webster, see below). In it they specify several origins of culture; the primary definition citing race, religion and 'social groups,' which may be bound by time or place. I think lojban should focus on precision first, so the scope should should be restricted to standardized entities:

Languages -
autonymic,
first priority to cover accepted top-level ISO codes,
then dialect and variant codes, others only deserve cmene.
Political regions -
autonymic in official language or most populous official language.
First priority to cover UN members territories,
then any self-declared independent regions which at one point had normalized relations with any UN-recognized state, so Tibet, Taiwan and the Confederate States of America all take precedence over Pedestria, my own sovereign state that I just declared.
Then once we get these down we automate a cmene-creator to read through geonames.org and cover all named territories and populated areas.

And that's all. I argue that these two alone are the most useful and best-defined terms to care about. Here's my feelings on the other portions of this page:

Ethnicity? Hard.
"Ethnicity" and "cultural groups" themselves are loosely defined social constructs, may have no easy autonymic solution (like Polynesian), and can be better expressed directly with {da kulnu de} where de is a chromosomal pattern or distinguishing feature for a particular race, or perhaps an activity for a term like 'nomadic,' 'chopsticks' or 'nerd' or whatever.
Religion? Tricky.
As for religion and philosophy, these are much harder to standardize (dewey decimal system?) and while useful names, not as specific as the ones listed above. Naming can also be an issue for multi-lingual schools of thought. Perhaps these could do with just cmene.
Geography? Who's version?
Do we stop at Australia or Greenland? To be thorough, I would think this should be left to some earth experts to decide just which land masses, tectonic plates, bodies of water, air masses and climactic systems would be useful to name. On a tangent, how about constellations or a complete periodic table of elements? Also, I don't see any way to come up with 'autonymic' terms for such natural entities, maybe they are better off with meaningful lujvo instead.

mu'o mi'e korbi

Definitions of Culture:
a : the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations
b : the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group;also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life} shared by people in a place or time <popular culture> <southern culture>
c : the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization <a corporate culture focused on the bottom line>
d : the set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic <studying the effect of computers on print culture> <changing the culture of materialism will take time — Peggy O'Mara>