New York

["Mark E. Shoulson" <cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!shoulson>]

RJB writes lots of stuff about how it's nobody's business but the
Lojbanana's whay we Lojbananas call places.

And he has a point.  I thought it was a little silly when some of the newer
gismu lists started having non-Lojban-specific glosses for Lojban-specific
words, like cmavo, lojbo, rafsi, gismu, tanru, lujvo, etc.  I mean, come
on.  There's nothing to be ashamed of about having words that are peculiar
to your own language.  You're not being unfair to define "lojbo" as "us,
and no-one else" (I haven't looked at the gismu lists lately, so don't
quote me saying what it really is.  I'm talking
hypothetcially-which-might-be-really here.).  Similarly with names.  What
we call something is our business (modulo objections like "well, I choose
to call red-haired people 'morons'" or stuff like that, assigning
meaningful and offensive names), and no-one else's.

It really boils down to the concept, oft-repeated, that the authority on a
cmene is the te cmene, the namer, and not the se cmene, the named.  It is
polite to refrain from calling someone by a name he'd rather not be called
by, but nobody can stop you.  And, like everything else in Lojban, it also
depends on whether or not the audience will have a clue as to the referent.
Which leads us back to square one.  Whatever we come up with, it won't make
sense to at least one group somewhere.  We're trying to find a way of
mapping place-names into Lojban in such a way that people will be able at
least to guess at the referent.  An English/Spanish/French speaker will see
"New York" with some part of {cnino} in it, so a cmene incorporating the
concept of "newness" would seem logical, and anything else puzzling.  A
Bulgarian/Russian/Hebrew speaker sees "New York" as a collection of foreign
sounds, and throwing concepts like "New" into it are just as puzzling.  And
there's a whole continuum.  I doubt anyone would be averse to translating
the directions in the names of North and South America (assuming we'd be
building from those names, and I don't see why not), but "New York" has
less support, in my mind.  Someone recently posted some decision procedure
for distinguishing these cases, but I didn't really understand it.

Me, I don't really know.  Maybe something like "if the locals perceive part
of a word as decriptive, translate it".  That would take out the "New" in
New York, since New Yorkers don't think about old York, but leave "North
Carolina" (I imagine) and "South America".  But it's very fuzzy.

~mark