zo tsali cu lojbo cmene zoi ny. Arnt Richard Johansen .ny.
See http://people.fix.no/arj/lojban/.
I don't know why he calls himself "tsali" --John Cowan
OK; here is the story of how I chose my name.
Basically, it is because I found my name too hard to Lojbanize. The native pronunciation of my name (in SAMPA) is ['A:n`t` 'r\ikAd` ju'hAnsn,_]. Both the lojbanization according to pronunciation (.ant. rikad. .iu'ansn) and the lojbanization according to orthography (.arnt. rikard. .iuxansn) are unacceptable to me.
Therefore I decided to translate my name, and turned to a naming dictionary to find out what my name originally meant. Apparently, "Arnt" means "eagle", and "Richard" means powerful. To my dismay, there is no shorter word for "eagle" in Lojban than cpirAKuila. So I decided to stick with my second first name, and named myself tsali.
--mi'e tsali
isn't vlipa closer to "powerful" than tsali? --jay
Possibly. In fact, now that you mention it, I'm not entirely sure the dictionary said "powerful" or "strong".
I always thought of {vlipa} as something like "good at something". "mi vlipa tu'a la lojban .i ku'i mi na'e vlipa le nu cpare" But in any case, it's too late to do anything about it now. --mi'e tsali
I disagree with the notion that the creation of cultural gismu gives
certain cultures (those with their own gismu) an advantage over others
(without cultural gismu) in Lojban usage. This hinges on the assumption
that gismu space is special, and that selbri that were created as gismu
are somwhat more important than other words. I don't think this was ever
the intention of the gismu list.
If the word form of cultural gismu does matter, it must be because of
Zipfean shortness. But I don't see the fact that some cultural words
are longer than others as a threat to Lojban's cultural neutrality. If
they were, surely there would have to be other much worse abominations
in the gismu list, as it, too, was created without any form of semantic
theory. Those are probably much more difficult to find, as they are
hidden to us because of Sapir-Whorfean assumptions, but nevertheless,
cultural gismu get attacked because they are easy to spot.
I dislike people creating fu'ivla such as "steito", or even wresting
"glicybau" out of lujvo-space with such non-words as "gli'icybau", in a
misguided attempt to put all cultures on an equal footing.
In short, I don't consider this matter important enough to warrant
neither a baseline change or making communication in Lojban more
difficult and prone to misunderstandings.
---
Tsali is also a Cherokee who became legendary as well as a recreation area in North Carolina.