TECH: Morocco, Lebanon, or Indonesia

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

There is no claim that the current mix of Lojban speakers has anywhere near
a demographic sample of the world's speaker base, whereas the weightings
that were used WAS balanced based on all the world's speakers.

Presumably, if the eventual speaker base reflects world populations, Indonesia
especially would represent a much more important topic of conversation, given
its high population.  I can argue much less strongly for the Islamic countries,
because the high population of Arabic speakers is spread over such a large
number of countries, that it can be claimed that the amount that Arabic s
speakers will talk of a particular one of them is much lower (the same could
be said of the large number of Spanish-speaking countries in 'Latin' America,
and we perhaps should have given more of them cultural roots than we did, based
on the Arabic precedent.  But of course, there ARE more important Spanish-
speaking countries and less-important ones, but it is much harder to decide
which of the Arabic countries (besides Saudi Arabia, which is actually quite
low in population) are important in any sense longer than this morning's
news headlines.  So, to be impartial, I set a population floor, and made
gismu for all that I could, but allowed countries below a threshold to be
omitted if they did not have an 'obvious' gismu, or the best choices conflicted
with more important words.

The ability to make easy borrowings of course made it easier for us to limit
the cultural words, especially in cases where therewas a conflict with
another root.  But borrowings (le'avla) make poor compounds, and most of the
cultural words are most useful in lujvo compunds.

Perhaps our Australian readers might see more mention of Indonesia in the
newspaper than those of us in the USA.  If and when we get Lojbanists talking
about the daily news (which admittedly almost none of us do at this point,
for lack of major interest among other reasons), people will tend to want
words for cultural-based compounds more than they do now.  At this point,
my strongest case seems to be in the use of the cultural gismu in distinguishing
among currencies- one of the few areas where the cultural gismu HAVE been
used in actually speech and writing (though only a few of them - sralo, brito,
merko, kadno, and I think dotco and rusko have been used in compound with
rupnu at some point).

lojbab