Subject: Re: [lojban] spatnrosace

From: Pierre Abbat <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2001 16:56:37 -0400

On Friday 05 October 2001 09:42, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:
> A non-technical *English-speaker* perhaps, and maybe only one of those from
> the US or UK, since probably some of these are as exotic in Australia and
> New Zealand as kiwi is in this country.
>
> But what fruit distinctions and similarities do Chinese and Hindi and
> Arabic natives make? I never checked, and I suspect that you haven't
> either.

I didn't, but Aolung and Nick and Adam should be able to tell us for their 
respective languages. They probably have everyday words for plants that to me 
are unfamiliar taxa next to familiar ones. Let them contribute some names to 
the list.

> >I didn't until I read that page. He knows a peach, a plum, a cherry,
> >an apricot, and an almond, and probably recognizes that they are similar.
>
> Well, I don't know about almonds, which I thought were nuts, but the rest
> are an edible fruit with a single seed in the middle.

All of them, seen from the side, have a point opposite the stem, and all of 
them, seen from the end with the seam at the top, have veins at 1:00, 6:00, 
and 11:00. The almond shell and the peach pit both are riddled with tunnels. 
The seam of the almond, unlike the rest, points outward.

> When I was in college, the biology teacher would talk about acer or acer
> secorum expecting us to know that these were maples/sugar maples. he waas
> talking about the trees and not the classification slots.

Lojban distinguishes between organisms and species. Latin doesn't.

> You seem to be trying to add type IV fu'ivla with the idea that everyday
> people will learn these as often and as easily as they learn gismu. If
> they don't, you gain nothing by making them type IV over type I-III.

I find gismu hard to learn and spend much of the time looking them up when I 
write Lojban. They don't look like other words I know for what they mean. 
{gerku}, for example, is a mixture of Chinese and Hindi, neither of which I 
know. {simba}, the Loglan word, makes a lot more sense than {cinfo} - it's 
the same as Swahili, and one letter different from Sanskrit. {ractu} and 
{ratcu} are too close.

Fu'ivla based on Linnean names, which about 32 of the 39 are, are easier to 
remember. They come from one language (or often two, Latin and Greek), and 
the Linnean names are used by biologists and others worldwide. I see nothing 
wrong with using Linnean fu'ivla as common names; this is common in French 
and Spanish (where many of them, e.g. "orge" and "trigo", are not fu'ivla), 
and happens ofter enough in English (e.g. spirea).

phma