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

[Jacob Errington <nictytan@gmail.com>]

I have to agree with Pierre on this. Lojban is meant to be culturally neutral (albeit however that in some places it isn't quite as neutral as it should or could be) which means that any common names that are based on those of another language aren't appropriate. Lojban's "common names" for plants and animals are simply based on the Linnean names.

I've had this discussion before in #lojban, and the conclusion seemed to be that, yes, although it is strange to see linnean names in common speech at first, it isn't any more far-fetched for a ten-year-old to say "chamomille" than it is to say {xrulnrekutita}. In fact, having the "common name" be, I repeat, based on the Linnean name would probably prove to be advantageous for a lojbanist biologist, as while studying, that lojbanist wouldn't have to double his or her vocabulary, learning the Linnean names and then mapping them to the common names.

As for la'o, I didn't know/forgot that it was based on latmo (makes sense though, [latmo]'s only rafsi is -la'o-). Regardless, one must choose the delimiter for the non-lojban quote. Simply choose a meaningful delimiter. [i ti me la'o line'an. rosa kordesii line'an], or if you're a cmevla-hater like me, it's possible to use some brivla as the delimiter, such as [la'ocme] or [la'o] again or simply [latmo] or even [ly], if from context it's obvious that it's a Latin/Linnean name.

mu'o mi'e la tsani

On 8 March 2012 18:08, RexScientiarum <amt2839@gmail.com> wrote:

Right, I was thing about that and after I made the post and came to the same conclusion, that the translations were in a general, non linnaean sense.

On Thursday, March 8, 2012 3:50:13 AM UTC-6, Arnt Richard Johansen wrote:

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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