On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 01:48, Oren
<get.oren@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.
Yeah, I guess fi'uvla is the way to go. The ones on the list are kind of.... ugly, I guess, but such is life. I wonder, since I'm not familiar with the fi'uvla creation process, if we could do something that could make these recognizable as the names of countries/languages/etc.? Like, say, the first consonant is always /s/? Or is that not worth it...?
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.
Again, I agree, but--why do bigger languages get "real" words, and others only "deserve" cmene (regardless, we should probably get the "deserve" out of the proposal :p)? What about in a few hundred years, when the dominant languages might be totally different, and this will seem really weird?
I think this is probably the right solution, with the caveat that what gets fi'uvla needs to be revised occasionally (say, every 100-150 years). Often that revision would probably not change much, but it might at some stages.
- 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.
I think UN is the way to go. I do think it might be worth not using the "relations with a UN-recognized state," though... I think a better way for autonomous areas and the like would be some sort of Zeitgeist measure--it seems relevant, for example, to have Chechnya, Basque Country, and Kurdistan fi'uvla if we want to be able to talk about world affairs in Lojban. Those seem more immediately pressing than, say, the CSA. Again, though, this would require regular revisions.
One other issue with both language and country names--are we using the English form to get the fi'uvla, or the native term? That is, is the fi'uvla for "Finland/Finnish" derived from "Finland" or from "Suomi?" I'd vote the second, as it introduces less bias. And, with languages, should the language "English" be demonstrably related to "England," or should it (could it?) be different?
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.
Yeah, anything with "ethnicity," except as a gismu that says something reflects/seems like x ethnicity, should be chucked, IMO.
-
- 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.
This one is kind of tricky, but I think there should still be fi'uvla for the major groups, but not subdivisions--so, Christian, Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism should probably have one, while Catholicism, Sunni Islam, and Zen Buddhism shouldn't. If we made the cut at 5 million or more followers, we'd have (according to the numbers on Wikipedia):
Christianity
Islam
Irreligious/Atheism
Hinduism
Folk religion/Deism
Buddhism
Shinto
Sikhism
Judaism
Bahá'í Faith
Jainism
I think the "Folk religion" one is especially important, as it would provide a good way for people to describe their beliefs. Actually, maybe there should be two gismu: one for "(world?) religion X" and one for "native religion of X people." We would have to think about Shinto, though, since Shinto is basically the native religion of the Japanese people, so it might not need it's own fi'uvla, but rather a conventionalized 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.
I am not a geologist/geographer/etc., but my impression was that the idea of the seven standard continents was pretty widely excepted. Oh, but I see now that that seems to be largely by convention. In looking at the map of the major tectonic plates, though, (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plates_tect2_en.svg), making the fi'uvla technically mean "a land mass on X plate" might be useful...