On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 1:45 PM, Bob LeChevalier
<lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:
Jonathan Jones wrote:
1) Having gismu for some cultures and not others is biased, and therefore violates the "culturally neutral" stance of Lojban.
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.
That's a very good argument, and one I wish had been presented at least a week ago.
> 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.
Um, that's basically what I said in the bit you cut out.
lojbab
--
Bob LeChevalier lojbab@lojban.org www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.