On 27 May 2013 17:48, selpa'i <
seladwa@gmx.de> wrote:>
>> But what happens whether "la betsemes solvor" wants to marry "la
>> selpa'i tsani"? Oops. What should we do with them? Do we forbid them
>> to marry because the child's name violates the language naming rules?
>
>
> You'd have to call them something like {la broda me la .betsemes. selpa'i}. It's very ugly, but because there is a way to make it work, it's not broken, just inconvenient. Or so goes the argument.
In the Western academic tradition, citation is made with the source
author's surname, and the whole name is inverted in the bibliography so
that the surname comes first to be sorted. This practice would look like
{solvor co betsemes} with the current anti-tanru order of cmene ({solvor} being the surname/modifier). Instead, we could be consistent with the general head-final order of tanru and have the "first" name come after the modifying surname(s):
lo mlatu ratcu
a rat which is related to a cat (e.g. caught or eaten by a cat)
la solvor betsemes
Betsemes who is related to Solvor (e.g. born to or raised by Solvor)
"First" names are "first" in the sense that they precede the other parts of a person's name in certain natlangs. But it's surnames - also called "last" names - which historically come before newly given names that are historically "last/newest" names. In several Asian countries, the historically-first "last" name comes first, and the historically-last "first" name comes last. This is analogous to the biological nomenclature, where the generic name precedes the specific name, such as "Giraffa camelopardalis rothschildi". In a sense, "Giraffa" is a surname, shared by different descendents of the genus. If we were to Lojbanize this composite name, I wouldn't expect it to be inverted for no good reason. (And the fact that certain components of such biological names are readily available as non-cmevla (i.e. gismu, lujvo, fu'ivla) while others aren't, is another argument for allowing the use of both word-types in a seamless manner.) (FWIW, the order of surname is also somewhat related to endianness. Wikipedia often uses the big-endian YMD format, again most common in certain Asian countries, for easier sorting of dates in the table.)
Or perhaps we could radically change the default tanru order to head-initial, which would be consistent with the right-branching NOI, GOI, ME, NU, etc:
lo ratcu (->) mlatu (->) noi (->) me (->) lo ratcu (->) poi (->) co'e (->) lo mlatu
la betsemes (->) solvor (->) noi (->) me (->) la betsemes (->) poi (->) co'e (->) la solvor
Regarding the question of surname derivation:
To the extent that Lojban root words are each an algorithmic combination of different words, I can imagine a Lojbanistan municipality accepting as a child's surname an algorithmic combination of the parents' names. If genomes can merge to produce a child into the physical world, why couldn't phonemes merge to introduce them into the linguistic world?
mu'o