Jacob Errington wrote:
When it comes to discussing the front of the body, we have {flira} for
the face, {cutne} for the chest, and {betfu} for the abdomen. Now, when
it comes to discussing the back, there're the (poorly formed) lujvo
{cutyti'e} and {befti'e}, which according to the gismu deep stucture,
simply mean "x1 is behind the chest of x2" and "x1 is behind the abdomen
of x2". With that in mind, would "back of head" be {firti'e} ? Can we
coin joi-based lujvo to mean frontal side and dorsal side? They could be
{cutyjolbe'u} and {cutyti'ekepjolkembefti'e} but that's just getting silly.
When we created the gismu, we simply intended trixe for the back/posterior/dorsal and crane for the front/anterior/ventral, presuming that people would make lujvo if more specificity was needed (e.g. to distinguish dorsal and posterior in a fish, which has the spinal axis in a different direction from humans).
We did not distinguish between the back direction (behind the body, not part of the body) and the back part of the body - that was also to be done with lujvo. There were a variety of ideas, on how to do this so we decided not to decide. But we didn't think the distinction warranted two different gismu, because in fact we didn't find such a distinction was very clear in the natlangs we were looking at.
I'm not recommending specific lujvo now, because I suspect that different solutions would apply to different problems. A chart of terms on wikipedia that was mentioned applies to vertebrates, but what about other animal (and plant and whatever) forms?
I'd be inclined to use one or more fu'ivla before creating a new gismu. Adding to the gismu set when it was avoidable was offensive to a large segment of Lojban supporters back when we were finalizing the list, and we stopped considering changes when the number of proposals to eliminate gismu exceeded the number of new additions.
back of head would presumable by sedyti'u to correspond to your {cutyti'e} and {befti'e}. While humans have a flira on the sedycra, one can certainly imagine having a separate flira on the sedyti'u.
lojbab -- Bob LeChevalier lojbab@lojban.org www.lojban.org President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group. To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.