On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 11:43 PM, komfo,amonan <
komfoamonan@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I find myself vehemently opposed to these proposals. Some of the reasons
> I've stated earlier in this or another related thread, but to summarize.
(number 2) seems like an actual reason to oppose the proposal. All the
others seem at most like reasons to remain indifferent.
> 1) There is cultural bias all over the language. Whatever bias is perceived
> as a result of autonymous vocabulary creation isn't IMHO much of a big deal
> in comparison.
Personally, I would agree with that. I wouldn't put cultural
neutrality as the main advantage of making use of the ISO codes to
create fu'ivla, even though this was what started the idea.. Just
forget about cultural neutrality for a minute, is the use of ISO codes
to make fu'ivla still a bad idea?
I suspect that, if it weren't for the cultural neutrality issue, the ISO scheme would be unlikely to have been dreamt up.
> 2) The ISO approach yields hundreds of words which are to me frustratingly
> similar.
This is the only one that sounds like an actual reason to me.
But I'm not sure how valid it is. Of course, if you see an
alphabetical list of all of them together they will look very similar,
but in practice you would be unlikely to be using more than a few at a
time.
Consider for example:
gugde'i'e: x1 is the country with ISO code 'IE' (Ireland)
gugde'isu: x1 is the country with ISO code 'IS' (Iceland)
gugdesuzu: x1 is the country with ISO code 'SZ' (Swaziland)
Both the suffix -land in English and the prefix gugde- in the fu'ivla
give you a hint that it's the name of a country.
The difference in the fu'ivla is actually greater than the difference
between "Ireland" and "Iceland" in English.
Of course, not that many country names in English use the suffix
-land, but I think in Chinese most country names do use the same
sufffix. (And lujvo ending in "-gu'e" are also quite frequent).
Wikipedia gives about eight countries ending in 'guo2'.
[-snip-]
>
> I don't have enough time to devote to Lojban these days to generate 250
> autonymous words for languages & put them into jbovlaste, or even to decide
> why they should be brivla rather than cmevla. Shrug. But it's a fascinating
> discussion.
It's actually 7704 language codes, not just 250. It's unlikely that
anyone would have the time or the desire to handcraft them one by one.
Oh, I just meant 250 as a good healthy start ;). And I have certainly got the desire, but not the time.
[-snip-]
Your comments are appreciated doi xorxes. I may be the sole opponent, & I'm not too thrilled with the typographical innovations either, so maybe I'm just a curmudgeon ;)