la .tijlan. cu cusku di'e
> On 27 May 2013 17:48, selpa'i <
seladwa@gmx.de <mailto:
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)
This brings up a point that has to be laid out clearly. Is a string of cmevla to be considered a single name, or is each cmevla to be seen seperately? Currently, {la .solvor.betsemes.} is just a single name, without any real structure. The Merge must decide whether to keep CMEVLA strings atomic as a whole (Option 1) or to split them apart just like normal tanru (Option
2).
Option 2 has the effect that some multi-cmevla would undergo a slight change in meaning, e.g. imagine {la .klaus.peter.} whose name consists of two equal parts, neither of which can be considered to modify the other. Or imagine someone whose name contains a glottal stop. The effect that Option 2 would have on such names *might* be negligible, I'm not sure. {la .klaus.peter.} would be a tanru name, so it means a "klaus" type of "peter".
In any case, we could manipulate such names freely. We can {.klaus. bo .peter.} or {.peter. co .klaus.} because once split, the above problem doesn't exist anymore (it's effectively a case of {BRIVLA bo/co BRIVLA}), though it still makes a difference for the meaning of the unsplit cmevla string. It becomes especially apparent once you add a third component that is supposed to modify the entire cmevla string:
lo xekri .ford.taurus.
Option 1 has it that {melbi} modifies
{.ford.taurus.}
Option 2 would interpret it as {(melbi .ford.) .taurus.}
It can't be both, so a decision has to be made.
> "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:
Please no. The entire language is generally left-branching, apart from {bo}. Let's not revert something so fundamental.
In what way are ME or NU right-branching? To me, the term "branching" or "grouping" in this context means the grouping of identical (or similar) items in succession, for
instance:
broda brode brodi -> (broda brode) brodi
X .e Y .a Z -> (X .e Y) .a Z
Some constructs are head-initial, but those have two different components interacting instead, e.g. {KOhA NOI}. I think we need to dinstinguish between these different situations of branching.
I don't think it's a good idea to get rid of symmetry. The whole point of The Merge is to *increase* symmetry, is it not?
mu'o mi'e la selpa'i
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