states/provinces/counties

[Edmund Grimley-Evans <cbmvax!uunet!RZ.UNI-SB.DE!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!dfkihueg>]

Bruce's heuristic, that if other languages translate a proper name, so
should Lojban, seems to me very sound. I often use the same heuristic
for translating proper names into Esperanto. In German New York is
traditionally called "Neu-York", in Esperanto "Nov-jorko",...

I shouldn't waste much time inventing Lojban-names for the British
counties. Many of the English names are completely unknown even to the
people who live in them! And many of them have no long tradition.
Very few British counties have their own names in Esperanto, and only
one of them has a name in French. (I'm not going to tell you which,
guess!)

It would be much more useful (at least in the case of Britain) merely to
work with the names of the largest cities.

Edmund