Re: Animal {gismu}

[Chris Handley <CHandley@GANDALF.OTAGO.AC.NZ>]

John Cowan writes thus:
>
>Using the wonderful tool WordNet (from Princeton University), I've examined
>our gismu relating to animals, as a simple test case, and I've found a few
>things that seem to me to be holes.  <..>
>
>  <..>
>
> PROPOSAL:  I suggest that we need >high-quality< lujvo, or else new gismu,
>for the following kinds of animals right away.  Entries for them appear in
>the tree below, with "#nnnn" in place of a gismu.
  <..>
> Comments?
>
Very definitely, the creatures identified are all important in one way or
another. We could also have a 'catch-all' for the local worrisome insect --
in South Africa it was mosquitoes, here it is sandflies.

>
>Vertebrata:Mammalia:Primates remna human
>Vertebrata:Mammalia:Primates smani monkey ape simian baboon chimpanzee

Just to mess things up because animals do not split neatly into species. The
latest evidence claims that the DNA distance between chimps and us is less
than half the distance between either and gorillas and hence any reasonable
classification should at least acknowledge this (%-}. I realise that the
human - non-human split is probably too firmly entrenched to expunge, but it
woule be nice to at least think about it. Alternatively lump us all together
with some prefix to distinguish between the various species (the
Pongid/Hominid split is totally artificial).


======================================================================
Chris Handley                                     chandley@otago.ac.nz
Dept of Computer Science                       Ph     (+64) 3-479-8499
University of Otago                           Fax     (+64) 3-479-8577
Dunedin, NZ
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