I HAD assumed that taxonomy, at least, would be treated in one of those two ways (because, as you said, it is always treated as a foreign language, hence why it is italicized in print or supposed to be underlined when handwritten) but it looks as if other community members have already begun to lojbanize taxonomic names so I thought MAYBE there is some feeling that there is a need to lojbanize biological classification for whatever reason (which is why I ask, and I thought maybe there was some feeling that the current Linnaean method based primarily on Latin and some Greek and written in the Roman alphabet wasn't a universal, culturally/scientifically unbiased method. Idk, just trying to understand/rationalize why someone thought there had to be a lojban name for eubacteria {fadjurme} and the like).
As far as IUPAC goes, all I meant was that I don't know how IUPAC works exactly in other languages, other than the fact that it is different from IUPAC nomenclature in English. I don't need a description of how to IUPAC naming works, at least in English, I already know how that works. Maybe I was a bit misleading when I said I didn't have an esoteric understanding of because I DO understand it, I just wouldn't claim to be an expert qualified to write the lojban IUPAC rules and that hopefully some well respected career chemist happened to speak lojban and WOULD be qualified to write the lojban IUPAC rules. I was trying to be humble; of course now I am probably needlessly getting defensive over my 'geek' ego but so be it. I know you weren't trying to be derogatory or anything so please don't take anything I say in a bad way. As far as speaking lojban, however, I AM in fact a complete 'noob'. (It is a good point you made though about how unlike Indo-European languages IUPAC nomenclature is)
Anyway...I digress, so lets continue. Because IUPAC names
are language specific (despite the fact that the English is becoming more universally accepted) it seems DOES seem malglico to just default to English IUPAC (malglico for the same reasons Robin listed in his essay here:
http://neptune.spaceports.com/~words/ial.html that English shouldn't be an International Auxiliary Language).
As you said there isn't much room left in lojban for all the affixes (which I had suspected might be the case) used in IUPAC nomenclature. As mentioned earlier, I am a complete lojban 'noob' so this might be a stupid question but is there some way that a cmavo or something could be used to denote "Hey we're talking about a chemical nomenclature here!" and thus allow the 'grammar' rules within the limiters to be tweaked to be more IUPAC friendly while still keeping the nomenclature 'lojbanic' in the sense that it is unique to lojban, uses lojban valsi and characters (in w/e orthography), and phonology? Would not a similar system be viable for, say, a unique lojban taxonomy as well? (Since it seems, as mentioned earlier, that some lojban speakers [not me necessarily] appear to think biological taxonomy needs to be lojbanized as well.)
Wasn't there some sort of system similar to this idea proposed for a Polish math system or w/e? (Not that I know what that is, Polish math I mean. I am guessing that it has to do with the fact that math terminology isn't actually universal, something like the difference between British and a US billion, trillion, quadrillion, etc.?). Now I probably am sounding really stupid but you'll just have to forgive me for being the ignorant American here and not knowing what Polish math is.
On Wednesday, March 7, 2012 2:28:01 PM UTC-6, Pierre Abbat wrote:
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.