Re: [lojban] So what do we say for Swedish? (was "Summary: Cultural fu'ivla")

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't think it would take 100, but I'm not sure of the specific number;

Wikipedia says ISO 639-5 has 114 codes for language families:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639

> in
> part, this is because our decisions about how to group things could change
> the number.  As I mentioned yesterday, we could split Niger-Congo into Bantu
> and, basically, "other" Niger-Congo. Likewise with Chinese (which,
> linguistically, is either a worthless term, or a family and not a language).
>  There are only five or six major ones on the list that I've been looking
> at, but if we keep to the highest level classifications possible, it
> shouldn't be too bad.

But if we go with ISO for languages, it's hard to justify using a
different arbitrary preference for families.

> I think using the language families has any number of advantages.  First, I
> was envisioning this as something that would be both useful to linguists and
> easily learnable.  I think a list of alphabetized language names in Lojban
> would be really scary, and possibly worthless, if they all started exactly
> the same (granted, you could sort some other way, but still).  An
> alphabetized list with family names at the beginning, though, would actually
> group languages together by family.  Plus, I really just think learning
> words which are half the same as any other word for any other language is
> going to make learning language names REALLY difficult, and thus likely
> cause these to never be adopted.

It's only the first out of four syllables that is common to all. And
the other three syllables correspond each to one of the letters of the
code, so if you know the code you know the fu'ivla, and vice versa.

> I don't think length violates neutrality--even if it does, we can't do much
> about it given the restrictions of Lojban phonotactics.

With my proposal every language uses four syllables. The number of
letters varies slightly if you don't count the apostrophe, and
depending on the three prefixes.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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