2010/4/2 Jorge Llambías
<jjllambias@gmail.com>
The problem is it only works for a few selected examples, not as a general rule.
I think it works for all examples, not just a select few. Some will need various changes to make them fit (three-consonant codes, for example, will need a buffer vowel, or the addition of an autonym vowel somewhere, for example), but there is no reason that we couldn't do that in a consistent way, so that, say, if you see a buffer vowel, get it out of there when you're looking for the autonym (that was in obvious, I realize, but it could still work for other things).
I think, too, that the representation of language family is a great idea, but I wonder about giving ourself more leeway with the form these would take. {-ine}, for example, works pretty well; {-esx} less so. We might be able to get a better match if we used the language family codes as the first part of the fu'ivla and changed them a bit to assure that they had a good cluster in a require position; we thus wouldn't have to tweak the language code as much (if at all, except clusters), making it more recognizable. {-ine}, for example, might become {.inde-}. And, presumably, the language code is more important to be able to look up than the family code.
We could also do some other things to make pretty clusters that are more autonymic. For example, the Niger-Congo language family is spread across nearly all of Africa, and is such a large grouping as to not be that useful. But, as mentioned before, nearly all Bantu languages (a large subset of Niger-Congo) have a prefix for languages of the form ki-, with variants in different languages like iki- and ichi-. Thus, we could use a separate prefix for Bantu languages, say {itci-} or {tci-} making them look more autonymic.
Okay, I said I was summarizing by then I said new stuff.... :p
Chris