Hii, found this today and am late to discussion but I’ve been learning Lojban and I wanna give this question a try

Lojban is a language inspired by, and maybe one day will be based on, the principles of formal systems of logic (mostly classical first-order logics). There are a few ways to refer to COVID(-19 too lol) and the virus that causes it in Lojban, none of which are particularly satisfying to me, some I even kinda dislike, but I guess that’s okay since the colloquial usage (from a logical perspective) is just a symbol for a thing that exists to be used in everyday predications like (in English): “I am sick with COVID-19”, “I wear a mask to avoid becoming sick with COVID-19”.

The most obvious way at first glance is: we have a type 2 fu’ivla (loanword which is a direct encoding of the loanword in Lojban) “kovdipaso” (kovdi one nine, lol) which means “x1 is the COVID-19 coronavirus”. This is quite terrible-seeming to me for several reasons including the fact that it’s ripped directly from English and has no hint to its meaning like with type 3 fu’ivla (which have part of a root word on the front to give a hint to its meaning) so the only way someone could know what that means is by knowing the English word (tbf, is quite common even to other language speakers I think cuz it is the official name, I think a lot of languages just use COVID-19 as a loanword directly too) or by having it memorized and also including the fact that it’s basically like saying the COVID-19 virus, which is a functioning way to refer to the virus tbf but it seems indirect when the virus’s real name is SARS-CoV-2 or SARS Coronavirus 2

Another reason I don’t like this is cuz there’s no good direct way to use it to refer to the disease of COVID-19 which sucks cuz it’s based on using that to refer to it lol. There’s def many ways to use it that will be understood (which vary in official correctness lol). To express the same meaning as the English language predicates I used earlier I would say stuff likeeee:

"mi ca bilma ri'a la kovdipaso" (“I am sick with COVID-19”)

I hate this one cuz the literal meaning is: “I am sick because of the COVID-19 virus”. It works I guess. The thing is bilma is a predicate word (selbri) that has the English definition “x1 is ill/sick/diseased with symptoms x2 from disease x3” and I only used the first slot to specify that I am sick. When you don’t specify a slot, it is implicitly filled with a word (zo’e) that means “something”. So really I’m saying “I am sick with some symptoms caused by some disease because of the COVID-19 virus” (ri’a is a “model” word which means “because of x1” which kind of injects another place into the selbri). It’s horribly indirect and doesn’t use the disease slot for the disease I have even though the word I used to specify the virus that is causing my disease REFERS TO THE DISEASE CAUSED BY THE VIRUS lmao, even if people would probably get it, I hope you’re starting to see why I dislike this loanword lol.

I was gonna try to compose some more, better sentences but I don’t want this to get too long lol. I need to get an account on the Lojban dictionary website so I could maybe make some better words or at least make kovdipaso’s definition better

Referring to COVID is so common at this point that we do need a short way to say it so I can’t overcomplicate this too much hehe

Okay, here is a lujvo (compound word derived from root words that has a definition) I composed from the tanru (compound word metaphor) “paso fepri te bilma” (19 lung-type-of disease): pavysozyfepryterbi’a. If I were to add this to a dictionary I would define it something like: “x1 is COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus (strain) x2”. It has 9 syllables sooooo idk about this lol. It’s an attempt, I am very new to this language hehe. Btw, making up your own words is quite normal in Lojban. It might be better to compose a lujvo which can refer to both the virus and the disease that the virus causes by converting the word (switching places) cuz you can kinda refer to the virus in description sumti (arguments to selbri using the articles “le” and “lo” which are kinda like “the”) with “te (swap x1 and x2 places) pavysozyfepryterbi’a”, idk. Ofc it may also just be better to composes some kind of taxonomic name for SARS-CoV-2. We should maybe have an algorithm for names based on standard taxonomy like our algorithm for referring to languages and cultures based on the ISO code cuz if you see that it’s quite clear what that means as long as you are aware of ISO codes

Ofc we could also just all agree on a better name for more informal use, idk. Like kovdipaso but with a better definition

I guess it doesn’t matter too much but I seek “”“”“correctness”“”“” lol