Re: [lojban] Cultural fu'ivla: summary and list of the ISO generated ones

[Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

Jonathan Jones wrote:
> 1) Having gismu for some cultures and not others is biased, and 
> therefore violates the "culturally neutral" stance of Lojban.

Only in the same sense that basing the gismu-making process on only 6 of 
the 12 most-spoken languages is culturally-biased, because it excludes 
all the rest.

If one thinks only about gismu, then perhaps it is.  If one considers 
fu'ivla made from the name of the language/culture IN the language, then 
we've more than neutralized that bias.

Gismu are shorter than fu'ivla, reflecting a presumption under Zipf's 
law of higher usage frequency, and references by speakers to their own 
language is a high frequency concept, so giving shorter words to 
more-spoken languages is one form of cultural-neutrality.

> The only
> acceptable solution to this is to either have a word for *all* cultures, 
> or to not have a word for *any* of them.

We decided otherwise.

> 2) The cultural gismu basically have too many meanings. For example, 
> {merko} means "x1 pertains to USA/American culture/nationality/dialect 
> in aspect x2". The solution to this is to 

... make lujvo based on them.  And in fu'ivla space, make culture words 
using the experimental space that allows fu'ivla to be made into rafsi 
and combined with the gismu used with the cultural gismu to make lujvo.

lojbab
--
Bob LeChevalier    lojbab@lojban.org    www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.

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