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Re: [lojban] Biological taxonomy and other 'esoteric' vocabularies like chemical nomenclature
All languages (except Latin itself, and maybe Greek from which many taxonomic
roots come) treat biological taxonomic names the same way: they are marked as
foreign (at least genus and species names) and (usually) undeclined. I know of
two exceptions, virus species names and some unranked taxa of plants like
rosids, both of which are in English, at least in English. Common names, such
as English "geranium" and Lojban "plargoni", can be derived from (or in
Romance languages, inherited from, such as Spanish "aves" and "avena")
scientific names, but may not have the same taxonomic extent.
Chemical nomenclature is a quite different beast. An IUPAC name of a
complicated organic chemical is very much like a long lujvo, and very unlike
the typical word formations of Indo-European and Semitic languages, which
consist of a root, or a few roots joined together in IE, with a bunch of
prefixes, suffixes, and inflections stuck on. I think, therefore, that IUPAC
should be done with lujvo in Lojban. But there isn't much room left for all
the affixes used in IUPAC. There are at least three ways numbers are used in
IUPAC: the oxidation state or valence of an atom, the number of copies of a
group in a molecule, and the atom to which a group is attached; and it's not
clear to me how to distinguish them in Lojban. Take for instance 1,1,1-
trichloro-2,2-di(4-chlorophenyl)ethane (aka DDT). The numerals denote which
atom the chlorines and phenyls are attached to; the "di" and "tri" prefixes
mean there are three chlorines and two chlorophenyls attached to the ethane.
Pierre
--
Jews use a lunisolar calendar; Muslims use a solely lunar calendar.
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