I want to summarize (again) all of this. I think it has anything new, so I'm sorry if it isn't useful. (I hope it will :) There would be two approaches for coining language fu'ivla: 1- use the native way of referring to the language. 2- use the ISO codes. The former is the nicer one, since most of the fu'ivla are coined from this. However, it's unpractical. We can't coin them all, since there isn't a list with all the native words (and all the other problems chris said). The later isn't that culturally unbiased, and has the problem that most of the resulting fu'ivla won't resemble the name of the language. But is the one that we can use to coin them all :) pierre abat said: > The way language names are coined in natural languages is completely > different. People who are interested in a particular language (hereinafter > Pelonian) find out what the Pelonians call their language (which requires > learning some Pelonian) and what their neighbors the Almonians call it. Then > they decide what to call it in, say, English. Then they write reports about > Pelonian and other people learn that there is such a language. They may, on > learning more Pelonian, figure out that they used the wrong word to name the > language ("Auca", for instance, is an exonym meaning "enemy", so they are now > called "Waorani" or other spellings thereof). > > I do not see a need for coining a type-4 or even type-3 fu'ivla for Baatonum > or Babatana until some Lojbanist is interested in those languages. Leave them > at type 1. > This is true... we don't have the need to coin them all. Nevertheless, it would be great to have them, or at least, a way to have them. (If we use it an algorithm, like xorxes', this is possible, without much work.) I thought of others benefits of using an algorithm: - With a little program, we can have the whole list. - That can work the other way: given a language fu'ivla, and another program, we can have additional information about it. Like: bangacu'a -> aca -> http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=aca One benefit of using fu'ivla is that there is no need to have only one word to one meaning (or meaning isomorphism :), so, we can have two fu'ivla for languages. xorxes said: > You can think of "banbubu'a" not as meaning "x1 is Baatonum" but > rather as meaning "x1 is the language with ISO-code 'bba'". > > Then if Baatonum for some reason became a hosehold word in > Lojbanistan, and people found "banbubu'a" too cumbersome, a more > friendly name could be coined. So, basically, Swedish can be sfe'ero as well as bansuve'e. Language autonyms (and perhaps with family attached) can be used along with the algorithm version. Also, the algorithm way can be extrapolated to countries. We can use the ISO 3166-1 list, that have codes of two letters for every country: http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166_code_lists/english_country_names_and_code_elements.htm Examples (using prefix gug-, gugd-): AR (Argentina) -> gugdaru US (United States) -> gugdusu This isn't such a long list (246 countries), so we could make a fu'ivla for everyone, but I think that would be a ton of unnecessary work. We should have them, and, if we need a more friendly name, we coin it. mu'o mi'e .leos. -- My lojban journal: http://learninglojban.wordpress.com My personal blog: http://leomolas.tumblr.com
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