The 20 new gismu

["Ivan Derzhanski" <cbmvax!uunet!chaos.cs.brandeis.edu!iad>]

... or which ones I dislike, and why.

I have never used the English words "magenta" and "cyan", and I have only
seen them in PC reference manuals (two of the screen colours), not in real
life.  Given that so many languages have no separate words for `blue' and
`green', or special words for `purple' or `violet', and also given that it
is so easy to build a tanru for a particular shade of any of the basic
colours (whatever this may mean), I think that including these two words
is quite inappropriate.

It seems that I know much less about plants than I thought; in any case,
I won't object against having a word for `hemp/hashish/marijuana', and one
for `sorrelgrass/rhubarb/buckwheat', and one for `cassava/taro/yam/manioc/
tapioca', although I'm unlikely to ever use any of them.  But I feel the
policy of interviewing the same six source languages is not the best one
for this case.  What can one expect `tapioca' or `taro' to be called in
e.g. Russian?  Is the word for `sorghum' not going to be {sorgo}?  I say,
it'd better be.

Non-Christian cultures don't care for godparents.  It is hardly a good
idea to equate them to aunts and uncles.

What is a virtue?

I agree that North and South America must have separate gismu, but I
think it would be better to make some a priori ones: all natural languages
use compounds to refer to the two continents, so again interviewing the six
source languages won't be too useful.

Ivan