Cultures

There are many cultural gismu allocated. They are extremely divisive, partially because they aren't well-defined and partially because people have strong political opinions as well as emotional attachments to gismu.

There's also the concept adopted by some speakers that the cultural gismu are only usable as rafsi, which precludes a single canonical definition of the gismu without spoiling all of the relevant rafsi. These speakers use cultural gismu to decorate lujvo with cultural origin, a Lojbanic adaptation of a longstanding and widespread practice in many cultures.

That said, we acknowledge the main critiques of cultural gismu:

  1. They unfairly privilege some cultures over others in the baseline.
  2. They are not phonetically faithful to how members of some cultures refer to themselves.

As a result, we will not endorse any particular cultural gismu, nor insist that the baseline is correct, but give a path for adapting any set of cultural gismu to fit within a single unifying framework.

Classes

There should be a class for kulnu1:

culture1: events
culture2: observations

prenu1: people

kulnu1: cultures
kulnu2: prenu1

natmi1: nations
natmi2: kulnu2

rutni1: artifacts
rutni2: kulnu2

turni1: prenu1
turni2: prenu1

tutra1: territories
tutra2: turni1

jecta1: governments
jecta2: tutra1

gugde1: countries
gugde2: kulnu2
gugde3: tutra1

This defines a template for all of the cultural gismu, as well as {rutni}.

TODO: this implies xamgu1 are events! A longstanding puzzle solved!

It should include the cultural gismu. It should also be in the upcoming "multiverse" feature, using a multiverse, because the baseline definitions should be culturally neutral.

What's the difference between {jecta} and {se tutra}? {jecta} doesn't imply {turni}; a government is a sort of organized group of people (a {stura} perhaps?) which claim to be {turni}, but turni1 are the violence-monopolists who physically occupy and oppress their subjects.

However, {kulnu}'s definition requires kulnu2 to be plural masses. The English says, "culture is what is shared among people and is not an individual trait," but this is a misunderstanding of relational logic. Logically, {kulnu} relates a set of people -- a subset of all kulnu2 -- to individual cultures in a many-to-many relationship. So, we're going to politely say that the baseline definition is misleading, and allow both rutni2 and kulnu2 to be individuals.

This class also implies that cultures, e.g. {merko}, should be conjugated instead of filled directly by individual people. Instead of {mi merko}, perhaps we should say {mi jai merko} for short. Putting the above classes to work, we might formally say:

mi se kulnu pa ka merko

Axioms

We should be able to define {turni} with something like:

da turni de <=> su'o gy ty zo'u: ty tutra da gi'e te gugde de gy

Why is {rutni} here? Its definition specifies that rutni2 are kulnu2, from which we may claim the following axiom:

da rutni de => su'o di kulnu de

Perhaps kulnu2 => cecmu2?

  • {cecmu}