So Robin entered right-hand rule to Gismu issues page.
Can you provide some examples of it's usage with all places filled in? Is it culturally-neutral (both left and right direction can be equally used)?
btw, lindar started this topic because he NEEDED a way of expressing the concept of "clockwise".
doi loi jbobadna, where are the examples after all?
I did a search for carna in the corpus (
http://www.lojban.org/corpus/search/carna), specifically to find out if my preferred definition (x1 rotates counter-clockwise on axis x2 in reference frame x3) actually would break past usage, and from what I saw, it's rarely actually used to describe rotational motion, and even when it is, the x3 is either not filled, or filled incorrectly. More often, it's used in the sense "x1 turns towards x3", as in {mi carna fi lo mi zdani vorme}.
The vast majority of uses are with completely unfilled places, as in in a tanru or abstraction.
Robin is of the opinion that we need to "turn" words, one for in things such as "Jeff turned to Sam and said....", and another for rotational motion, as in "The top is spinning counter-clockwise when looked at from above the spindle."
I would agree. I think that in most cases, changing carna to "x1 turns from x2 to x3" would not break past usage, and we could then have a different gismu for rotational motion.