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Re: [lojban] cmevla as a class of brivla

This post seems to get right to the point. .i'e

Jonathan Jones wrote:

On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org
<mailto:lojbab@lojban.org>> wrote:

    Betsemes wrote:

        <snip>
        betsemes
        solvor
        camgusmis
        xorxes


    These are cmene


        arxokuna
        selpa'i
        gleki
        tsani


    These are brivla used as "nicknames".  All sorts of words are used
    as nicknames in English, but they are not really "names".
      Presumably no one would be given a nickname as their legal name,
    if Lojban were ever adopted as a legal language.


I find this hard to reconcile. Why is .camgusmis., which we all know is
not Robin's given name, not a nickname, but tsani is?


Because we defined it that way.

A cmene has a consonant on the end.
We allowed for the possibility of using a brivla description in lieu of a name as an accommodation of natlangs that use ordinary words as names - the example we generally used was "Bear" Bryant, one time football coach. A brivla used as a name is thus akin to fu'ivla - legal in Lojban, but "second-class". We would have expected someone adopting "tsani" into a Lojban name to add a consonant, UNLESS the nickname was a translation from another language.
An even better example would be the use of actual descriptions as names in some languages (I am thinking of Amerind languages in particular, names like "Sitting Bull" or "Running with the Deer"). Converting these to cmene forms might be possible, but might lose some meaningful structure in doing so.
Alas, people have chosen to be far more anarchic with regards to name selection than we intended. I'm not sure that this is a good thing - the morphological distinctiveness of cmene, fu'ivla and other word categories aids in learning, and encourages people to think about morphology (which is vital for other aspects of the language), which is not something English speakers tend to do very much. 


Is it simply because one if a cmene and the other is only a cmevla?
One is a cmene, and the other is a brivla being used to call someone by description. "cmevla" means nothing to me as a concept. 


What about the dog named Bear? Would calling him la cribe when speaking
in Lojban not be calling him by name, but by nickname? We have to call
him la.cribes. to call him by name?
If you are translating the English word "Bear", you might very well call him "cribe", but categorically, doing so is translating the English rather than giving him a Lojban name. 


It seems odd to me to allow the usage of such constructs as la tsani, la
gleki, etc., but disallow naming ourselves or others with them, and I
don't like it.
We allowed lots of things to accommodate possible natural language habits, in part because we wanted to allow non-English patterns a chance to enter the language despite the very few non-English speakers in the beginning.
I admire when someone creatively mimics a non-Lojban style using the full resources of the language, but the non-standardness of such a style itself marks it as being atypical Lojban.
When I first ran into tsani's name, I presumed that it was a translation of his natlang name or nickname. I don't in fact know that this is not the case. 


The whole reason many jbopre call themselves with cmevla
is precisely because how outcast cmene are: must always be preceded
/and/ followed by a glottal stop, must always end in a consonant, and
may not have meaning- although they may be reflective of words that do.
And the Lojbanic philosophy was that this is the way that it should be. Names aren't brivla, and if a brivla is used as a name, it suggests involvement of all the places of that brivla. I have no idea what tsani considers to be the x1 and x2 of his brivla name, but those places are inherent to the word choice.
And the existence of predicate place structures for each and every brivla is about as fundamental a principle for Lojban as there could be.
A brivla description used as a name (marked with la or used vocatively with doi) should have a full place structure. 

A cmene on the other hand, has no place structure.  It is just a label.


This whole cmevla->brivla push seems to me to be an effort to make cmene
less outcast, more useful.
And as I see it, it is destroying the concept of Lojban as a logical-predicate language. I don't see anything "useful" about treating a cmene as if it had a place structure, unless you are meaningfully going to use that place structure. 


Personally, I think that cmene are better for foreign names, like
la.parís., but I like the idea of natively naming our own stuff with
cmevla. When speaking in Lojban, I like {la jbogu'e} better than
{la.lojbanistan.},
la lojbanistan has no places. It is a label for something, which we can further identify with relative clauses if it is unclear. If we want to add the places of gugde, we can do so with la lojbanistan noi gugde ...
jbogu'e is a brivla that implicitly invokes a people and a territory. It is not a name. Using it as a name without bearing in mind that it has a particular place structure is making the word meaningless (or more likely just invoking the keyword translation in a malrarna way).
"la jbogu'e" still has that place structure, as does la tsani have its own. Lojban simply doesn't work without place structures.
If I saw people making use of place structures in their brivla names, I might be more sympathetic. But they don't, and I suspect that absolutely no one thinks about the x2 of tsani when they use that as his name. 


I like {la jbobau} better than {la.lojban.}, and so
on. It just feels more natural, which I know isn't much of an argument.
It's aesthetics, and as a natlang native speaker, your aesthetics are suspect.
But until and unless you attach places to jbobau, and bear in mind that those places are present even when they are left unspecified, you aren't speaking a predicate language. 


Also, all names were originally a description of the person in the
language of that people. All of them. Some still are, like in Japanese
names and other Asian tongues. Using cmene means divorcing names even
further from their meaning, and I don't like that idea at all.


In Lojban, unlike natlangs, "meaning" requires predication.


Very few people today- that aren't Jewish- know that "Jonathan" is
Jewish for {lo se dunda be lo cevni}
I notice that you used "lo" and not "la cevni", which would be more correct. Lojbanically it would have to be "la se dunda (be fi zo'e) be la cevni be la xebro bei roda" and using those words one would implicitly understand it as a gift to some particular recipients, and one would not understand it as a transaction requiring payment. The natural language origins of this etymology start breaking down when one thinks about who the gift is for, and that God intended the "gift" to be transactional (canja) for some form of worship.
More important, a lot of people, especially those who aren't Jewish, nowadays are named "Jonathan" with no implication of any gift from any particular God. The etymology may be interesting, but it is meaningless to how the name is actually used.
In lojban, someone called la seldunda be la cevni has all that meaning, and thus most people named Jonathan should probably not want their name translated that way. 


and it's Lojbanization of
{la.djanatyn.} would be even worse off, because the meaning would be
stripped.
What's wrong with that, since the meaning is not used linguistically? It's a fossil or a time when perhaps names had more descriptive nature, and/or it is a preserved habit of people who don't think in predicates. 


I'll grant I don't know any people that would name their
children {la cevyseldu'a}, but then again, I only know one jbopre with
kids, and they're both girls.
And why couldn't a girl be called "la cevyseldu'a". Doesn't God give girls as a gift? On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with claiming that la.djanatyn. is typically a boy's name. 


My point is, I think that the meaning is important- and I realize that
calling myself .aionys. doesn't live up to that, being as it's a
meaningless Lojbanization of my online nickname. Honestly, my only
reason for keeping .aionys. is that I've had it for so long everyone
knows me by it, and I honestly have no idea what descriptive name I'd
give myself anyway, being the uncreative person I am, in contrast to la
stela selckiku, la selpa'i, la tsani, etc.
Personally, I wished that they used Lojbanizations of their real names. I think I personally started losing track of the community when I could no longer connect the Lojbanic handles to real people with real names. If you post as .aionys., I simply will not connect you to the one who posts as "Jonathan Jones", and I have absolutely no idea who stela selckiku, selpa'i, and tsani are in real life (even if I may have met them at a Logfest, I wouldn't remember).
I've thought of the Lojbanic "cmevla" as you call them as being somewhat akin to Internet handles, which are sometimes identifying, but as often as not are obscuring of the real identity. I didn't choose to call myself "lojbab". People started calling me that, and they weren't Lojbanists, and it became how I was most commonly known. It was also useful because at the time there were more than one "Bob" active in the community. But there is no real meaning, and hence no predication, and thus I can have all kinds of fun with the fact that I have nothing to do with logical-soap, whatever that would be. 


I mean, what would be the cmene for {la dansu kansa be lo labno}?
That would in fact be an example of a description being used legitimately as a name (not having seen the movie, so I don't know how well it applies), since it invokes a predication, which can be manipulated linguistically using the tools of Lojban as can any predication.
I believe that some languages that use descriptions as names do indeed manipulate them linguistically. But I'm hard pressed to think of an example at the moment. In standard English, on the other hand, names are just labels; any meaning is incidental, and a name like "Dances with Wolves" or even "Bear" Bryant stands out as being non-standard. 

lojbab

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