GENERAL: cultural gismu

[solpahi]

... are annoying.

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/boo_to_cultural_gismu

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/cultural_gismu

I really wish they would all go (with the exception of lojbo).

Arguments:

1. Cultural gismu violate cultural neutrality. "The gismu are privileged words because they have rafsi and because they are the core non-cmavo vocabulary. To assign gismu and rafsi to some cultures and not to others is to violate cultural neutrality."
2. The cultural gismu often don't actually sound like the names of those cultures.
3. What a huge waste of gismu space.

My personal preference would be to get rid of all of them (lojbo can be kept). Make zi'evla for cultures and languages. zi'evla are an open class, therefore as many as needed can be created without running out of space, and also they allow for more shapes and thus for a closer mapping to the source words.

The cultural gismu are Bad™.

A lot of people over the years have complained about them. Few have had the willpower to follow through with the desired abandonment of the cultural gismu because the necessary replacement zi'evla don't exist yet (or are not satisfying enough (ISO fu'ivla)). The gismu already exist, and are the lazy option that people always fall back on. One step to making the transition more likely could be to no longer mention these words in word lists!

[uakci]

On Aug 13, 2016 5:13 PM, "solpahi" notifications@github.com wrote:

... are annoying.

Yup.

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/boo_to_cultural_gismu

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/cultural_gismu

I really wish they would all go (with the exception of lojbo).

Arguments:

1. Cultural gismu violate cultural neutrality. "The gismu are privileged words because they have rafsi and because they are the core non-cmavo vocabulary. To assign gismu and rafsi to some cultures and not to others is to violate cultural neutrality."
2. The cultural gismu often don't actually sound like the names of those cultures.
3. What a huge waste of gismu space.

My personal preference would be to get rid of all of them (lojbo can be kept). Make zi'evla for cultures and languages. zi'evla are an open class, therefore as many as needed can be created without running out of space, and also they allow for more shapes and thus for a closer mapping to the source words.

The cultural gismu are Bad™.

A lot of people over the years have complained about them. Few have had the willpower to follow through with the desired abandonment of the cultural gismu because the necessary replacement zi'evla don't exist yet (or are not satisfying enough (ISO fu'ivla)). The gismu already exist, and are the lazy option that people always fall back on. One step to making the transition more likely could be to no longer mention these words in word lists!

Let's keep the gismu for now, but add a note telling the user to switch over to some zi'evla. Also, we could start assigning -goi-rafsi to those (i.e. -gligoi-, -polgoi-...).

[lynn]

I approve of throwing cultural gismu out, but there’s just something about the bulky ISO fu'ivla that appeals to me — probably the algorithmic generation, as opposed to the manual assignments there exist for goi-rafsi (see Spheniscine’s list).

goi-lujvo are a good idea, though. They make for nice, short words, without cluttering gismu space. Maybe, wherever it makes sense, we could still generate “country culture” goi-lujvo from ISO codes? Like FR → fergoi, PL → pelgoi? (This would be a complicated algorithm, to account for all the Latin letters and consonant cluster rules, but it should be possible. My idea is to change the vowel (here arbiatrily e) to encode more info in it.)