Re: new animal gismu

[John Cowan <cowan@SNARK.THYRSUS.COM>]

la lojbab. cusku di'e

> I have also indicated to Cowan that I think by intent, the word curnu can
> be extended to include all muticellular invertabrates (single-cells are
> covered under selci or jurme), especially since most of them are essentially
> worms of some sort anyway.  Cowan seemed to agree, in which case mollusk
> is covered by  shell-worm.

I am willing to accept shell-worm for Mollusca.  No other invertebrate
seems to have any sort of hard exterior except Arthropoda, and we have words for
those creatures.

> If jukni is extended to cover all non-insectoid arthropods, claw-jukni
> works well for crab/lobster.

Yes, but then there is shrimp, and still worse barnacle.  I'm still not
satisfied with any of the proposed lujvo for Crustacea. "jdari jukni"
probably is the best of the lot, as crustaceans have rather non-elastic
shells.

> If jalra includes all of the Orthopteran super-order and its descendants,
> it includes cockroaches, termites (which otherwise do not fit bilogiically
> even if they do fit the 'common household pest' definition), and grasshoppers
> crickets, and locusts, and a few others are covered, and it shouldn't be too
> hard to make restrictive lujvo, if not great ones.

Okay, I can live with this.  "pipjalra" is probably good enough for 'hoppers.

> Alternatively civla
> and jalra and sfani could take non-biological definitions, referring to
> pests of the insectoid variety that respectively 1) suck blood or otherwise
> parasite on living creatures 2) craw on or in surfaces rather more than they
> fly 3) fly.  I would then be prone to add spiders as a clearly identifyable
> 4 th kind, bees/wasps/hornets as a 5th kind, and use cinki to refer to
> bugs/beetles and all others that are arthropods, but not one of the
 categorized
> specialties.  Crab then becomes claw-cinki.

Ugh.  I think that "cinki" is clearly tied to Insecta.  As for flying, almost
all insects fly, so that is hopeless as an interpretation of "sfani".

> On the whole, we have avoid having gismu defined technically as opposed to
> by common lay interpretations.  Thus 'winged mouse' would be perfectly
> fine for 'bat' if that is something that is done by several other
> cultrues, as I suspect it is.

It is, indeed, but winged-mammal is just as clear and less ugly.

> Remember that a few LogFests
> ago, 'gumri' for mushroom, and already existing gismu, was deleted in favor
> of the to-me-gross 'umbrella-mold', in the interest of cutting the number of
> gismu (that one grates because it happens to be one of the two deleted
> gismu that I cannot forget, and always want to use - the other being the
> unusable word for 'chin' which got overrwritten when we moved none other
> than 'cinki' on top of it in order to giveit a good rafsi.  Both of these
> changes occured several years ago, before the first gismu baseline.

A far better lujvo for mushroom, in most of its English uses, would be
food-fungus.  I think "mold" grates because it's a poor choice of keyword
relative to "fungus"; in Italian, e.g. edible mushrooms are simply
"funghi", and no further qualification is thought necessary.

--
John Cowan      cowan@snark.thyrsus.com         ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban.