Re: [lojban] Biological taxonomy and other 'esoteric' vocabularies like chemical nomenclature

[Arnt Richard Johansen <arj@nvg.org>]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 02:43:07PM -0800, RexScientiarum wrote:
> 
> 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).

I think the idea is that a language needs ordinary terms for species (ie. words like “bullfinch”, not words like “Pyrrhula pyrrhula”). In the cases were a gismu is not adequate, a new word needs to be created, and the word needs to come from somewhere. Often, the scientific name is an easily available source to make a new word from. That doesn't mean that the new word is a _translation_ or _corresponds with_ or _is used the same way as_ the Linnean binomial, just that it's based on that term, rather than a word from some particular language.

-- 
Arnt Richard Johansen                                http://arj.nvg.org/
På 1300-tallet kom tersen. Før og etter det var det meste bare rot, men
så kom Schönberg og ordnet opp. Puh. Endelig litt system. Så klarte Arne
Nordheim å rote det til igjen.                   -- Under Dusken 08/2001

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