beard, sports, athletics

[Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!GREBYN.COM!lojbab>]

I forgot to answer on these words - thanx Don for the reminder.  Of course
Lojban has words for them, but they are not roots.  I would make beard as
the lujvo fro jaw-hair xejykre or xe'akre (take your choice - they are
alternate spellings for the same word in effect, so the one that people think
sounds best is the one that will probably become more used - but aesthetics
may differ by native culture.

I have a little more trouble with sports and athletics, because what constitutes
a sport is very culturally dependent.  Is chess a sport?  Is track and field
a sport, or must you enumerate a specific event such as pole vault to identify
a sport.  What is the difference between sports and athletics?

kelci'e is a generic term for "play-system" which probably includes both
games and sports.  Some would say that a sport must be a game that takes
developed skill: selce'u kelci'e, or make it one word selce'ukelci'e.
Or sports/athletics, by the American culture tends to be limited to games
involving physical skill and coordination, perhaps slukelci'e (muscle-play-
system) or xadykelci'e (body-play-system).

This I see as one of the virtues of Lojban - that you pick a word that covnveys
the concept you want, rather than a single equivalent of some word from another
language.  But I would agree that it makes it more difficult to develop a
parallel word-list.  Perhaps I should amend my offer to Rick - I may give him
a few possible words for his list, with appropriate explanations of their
semantics, and let him choose the one that best reflects what he thinks the
word means in the other languages.  (This is a little like the hand/arm
probalem that I posed once - Russian uses a single word for both - you need
context to indicate which is meant.  So if you asked me to supply an English
word for ruka`, I would have to give you two English or Lojban words and
let you choose the one appropriate to your intent.)

To the extent that there are no fixed words in use for these concepts in
Lojban as yet, I don;t think it is because of our culture.  I have a beard,
but simply remake the obvious command anew every time I wish to mention it,
which seems seldom.  We do talk about games and sports a bit more, but no one
has really tried to divide up the semantic pie between those two concepts,
and we would avoid doing so like it is done in English without substantial
corroborating semantics in other languages (I tend to use Chinese to check on
the internationalism of metaphors - a metaphor that make sense in both
English and Chines is probably fairly understandable internationally.  So if
I understand the Chines metaphor, I'll tend to use it for Lojban if possible.)

lojbab