Chemical elements proposal (longish)

[Guy Steele <cbmvax!uunet!Think.COM!gls>]

   From: cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan@uunet.UU.NET (John Cowan)
   Date: Mon, 29 Apr 91 12:11:00 EDT

   iVAN. derjanskis. writes:
   > Who cares for
   > metaphorical uses of words?  I really hope you don't intend {nikle} to be
   > used for the US 5c coin, which most of the world has never seen!
   > 
   > To avoid being accused in malglicoism or malmerkoism, will you
   > please give, for each of the other five source languages, an example of
   > an element that has entered the list because of a metaphorical usage in
   > that language.

   There is undoubtedly a great deal of glico bias (and even merko bias) in
   the gismu list.  It's the product of raw empiricism, nothing more.
   However, "metaphor" is the very basis of including a word as a gismu rather
   than allowing it to remain a le'avla.  Borrowings do not enter into lujvo,
   but otherwise they are full-fledged Lojban brivla.  In general, a word
   should be a gismu if good and useful tanru can be made from it.

WHORF ALERT!  WHORF ALERT!  Are we in danger of self-fulfilling
prophecies here?  That is, will failure to include a word as a gismu
effectively discourage creation of certain tanru?  Will this bias
affect the evolution of the language in undesirable ways?  (Consider
the English word "bromide".  Now rewrite history only a little bit,
and further suppose the name of "bromine" had been "ChemSoupysalesium".)
In other words, I am postulating the converse: good and useful tanru
will be made from a word if it is a gismu.

An email mailing-list moderator should be known as the "cadmium
editor" because his job is to keep mailing-list chain reactions from
going out of control (he does this by absorbing a hefty fraction of
the flaming messages).  But I'm less likely to coin such a term if
you make me stick "xukr" onto the front of everything.  So there.  :-)

--Guy