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bye, various comments
The main reason I'm writting is to ask to be taken off the mailing list.
Lest I cause a blow to the general moral (as such requests tend to do) let
me emphasize that this is only temporary, as I'll be pretty much off the
net for a couple months and fear returning to a mailbox filled with a few
gig of letters to read. I'll return to the list when I'm back.
And to liven up discussion, I'll throw out a few comments/questions before
I go (hopefully someone someday will tell be the responses (are these
archived? where?))(and, of course, don't flame me; I won't read it):
la djan.co'n. pu cusku:
>5) The large countries (gugde) which speak any of these 14 languages,
>where their names differ from the language names:
...
> 5d) xrabo gugde:
...
> lubno Lebanese
> libjo Libyan
Although others have commented on the subject and I think lojbab's answer
is fairly satisfying, I can't resist: Clearly big is a more subjective
term than I'd thought. I suppose they might be seen as big amoung the set
of countries with less than 5 million people. A quick perusal of the
almanac revealed _18_ countries with more people than Lebonan whose main
language (not even counting African countries where English is official)
is one of the big six but who don't have there own gismu. None of them
were Syrian protectorates.
A few weeks ago someone here (I forgot who; sorry) mentioned table legs
(jubme tuple, but not in a tanru). Is this legal or malglico? (malgli?)
I suspect (without evidence) that many cultures use the term, but it seems
that it fails a more important "similar function" test: the main purpose
of legs is locomotion, table "legs" perform poorly here. What is a leg?
And what else to call them? (I'm not even going to get into clock faces,
needle eyes, nose cones, and male and female electrical connectors.)
I thought jimc's article on diklujvo was great! I don't mind the idea of
ambiguous tanru too much, but (IMHO) lojban badly needs such a system for lujvo.
Browsing though my recently aquired draft lessons (3, pp.3-16, if you have
it) I noted that time is given in base 12 (using the special cmavo for
bases greater than 10). Makes sense: daucac. == 10'o'clock, feicac. ==
11'o'clock. But since this is (sortof) base 12, whouldn't nocac. ==
zero'o'clock == 12'o'clock (rather than gaicac.) make more sense? Ok, a
minor point. Here's another: since we are in base twelve, and pi is a
"base point" (not just a decimal point), shouldn't li sopimu ("9.5" p.
3-19) translate as 9:25 (9 and five twelveths) rather than 9:30. (This
makes it easier too say quarter past nine, too: li sopici rather than li
sopiremu, although it will confuse the out of many people.)
Regarding chemical elements: I agree with the comments that the choice of
gismu-elements could have been better, but like nationalities, this is
arbitrary. I would like to see crome and nickle become more generic (as
lojbab and Nick suggest) but don't mind gismu for oxygen, and carbon. Is
there any easy way to specify an element by atomic number alone? How
about: this is a helium atom == ti [cu] ratni li re. If so, can we have a sumti place to specify which isotope it is? And maybe the excitation
state? And how do we name molecules anyway? As someone pointed out, all
this name-of-element stuff is kinda pointless without _some_ ideas about
that (we can always use another committee (zo'oru'e)).
co'omi'e djek. benetos. .i .a'o mi tavla pirodo ca la logfest. (I'd make a
tanru but I'm about to leave)