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--- In ceqli@yahoogroups.com, Rex May - Baloo <rmay@m...> wrote: > Ah, how shall we call military rank? I think Loglan did something like: > > Officer-1, Officer-2, etc. > > Any ideas for a systematic approach? > -- Perhaps. Admittedly, there is no way even to establish equivalencies across the different military and quasi-military services of the different nations of the world. What one service would mean by "Officer-2" -- who is subordinate, billet responsibilities, etc. -- would be utterly different from what another service would mean. It so happens that a US Navy lieutenant and a US Army captain are equivalent and are both O-3, but the parallelism falls apart across and outside the boundaries of the USA. HOWEVER --- it is in the nature of military services to have a strict rank hierarchy, so Officer-1, Officer-2 could be used within the context of any given military arm to mean something specific. One caveat: sometimes they create new ranks, or move them around a little. For example, the rank of Commodore does not usually exist in the US Navy. But in time of war, it sometimes gets reinstated, and it sits between Captain and Rear Admiral. If Captain is Officer-6 and Rear Admiral is Officer-7, where do we put Commodore? (Actually, Captain wouldn't be Officer-6 because we need to account for all the enlisted and petty/warrant ranks.... It would be around Officer-14, I guess.) This would also mean that an Officer-9 in one service might truly be equal to Officer-10 in another service; but that's for them to work out. --K