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gusnikantu wrote:
> Importance is not enough reason for creating gismu. Each name for
> race/tribe/culture is important for people who concern it, but there are
> many names for them, while we have only a limited space for gismu.
> Besides, again, White and Black is not names for race/tribe/culture as
> discussed above.
No, it is not enough. Importance gets a concept a word. Function would then
get it a brivla. But I provided other reasons as well; in particular,
utility and fundamentality should motivate the selection of a gismu in
favor of this word.
I would also add that this concept is important to those who are not White
as well. This idea is one of the fundamental driving forces in the vast
majority of human history for the last five centuries, at least. This is of
global inportance. It is not an other categorization by a minor tribe; it
is a cornerstone of modern society for some of the most powerful and
largest nations on the planet and played a profound role in every inhabited
continent on Earth.
I would not call it a tribal distinction or its own society; I would
describe it more as a prominent feature of consideration within a society,
which carries with it immense social, cultural, financial, and other
implications. Ethnicity is something of a culture which lives in and around
other culture.
Moreover, this word has - built into its structure - the ability to
reference the surrounding culture/society system. This further widens its
scope of utility. Whiteness does not mean exactly the same thing in New
York City as it does in Birmingham, Alabama - let alone in some part of
Bolivia. There is plenty of overlap and historical connection, which is
important too (and why I think that this cna be unified into a single
concept), but the differences are accounted for by way of the terbri.
> > If you do not like this word, you can either ignore it or introduce a
> > synonymous non-gismu brivla that is satisfactory to you in order to
> > alleviate your concerns.
>
>
> I actually don't need a word for White or Black people, because I prefer
> tanru for them if necessary, reflecting their vagueness of
categorization.
What sort of tanru would you use? Some might be good. But I am not sure
that you can capture all of the details in a reasonable and brief manner. I
think that the important implication - that this is part of one's identity
and is inherent to them based on their present and past cultural/societal
setting, and that it is a means of asserting all sorts of societal
privileges and protections, as well as a means of grouping certain people
in a way which has cultural inplications individually and more widely for
generations to come - is likely lost in those tanru and therefore would be
difficult to regain via lujvo. zi'evla seems like the only reasonable
option to me.
> I cannot ignore wasting of gismu space for categorization of
> skin-colors/hair-curliness etc. or races/tribes/cultures, because I want
> the space to be used for more valuable concepts. I will therefore
continue
> downvoting gismu for those.
It is not about skin color really, though. It is about ethnicity - a
cultural identity and the resulting treatment in a society. Aesthetics are
just a basis for assessing this trait/identity feature. If redheads
underwent similar treatment (as they might have), then I would be willing
to adopt a word for them too. But if they did not, then they can be
described simply via mention of hair color.
It is not possible to be culturally neutral whilst considering culture and
other abstract human constructs. But they must be linguistically supported
somehow. Perhaps all such cultural words should be made into zi'evla. I am
not sure that that really helps, but it could be done. However, since that
is not the case, then it seems perfectly reasonable - nay, necessary - to
introduce a word for this concept and to have it be a gismu. We should
accept its provisional introduction for now, and then we can discuss
tranaferring all such gismu to zi'evla space. Anything less would be
asymmetric and unjustifiable. There is no reason for "merko", "ketco",
"glico", or any of the others to exist as gismu while this word does not.
They all deserve words and they all deserve to be in the same category of
word. (Aside: Moreover, I would actually argue that a decent number of
these words, including this one, should be gismu).
___
Removing the word from the language does not make any of the problems
inherent to racism better, by the way. It is important to be able to talk
about these things; a name is control. (The intersection of these claims
with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis could be interesting).
We have a lexical gap in Lojban and that gap is a significant obstacle to
translation efforts and mere discussion.
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