.iankis.
lai .iankis. jinga .i lai .yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy .iankis. jinga
Sorry, that's those called .iankis. and none of them are the Yankees, they are all just one Yankee individually - try lai .iank. jinga
I'm not sure you're right about how lai works; I have to think about it some more. But even if you're right, you're still wrong. After all, they aren't called "Yank" either. By your analysis, each is called a "Yankee." Which would be .ianki. But Lojban cmene can't end in vowels, so you have to change it to end in a consonant. There are (at least) two ways of doing that: remove the final vowel(s), or tack on an extra consonant -- any consonant. Which you do is a matter of personal choice. You might argue that one way is perhaps more appropriate than the other, but you can't say that someone is wrong for chosing to cmenify .ianki as .iankis. Back to your analysis of lai for a minute, though, what about the Heat or the Jazz, which have no individual term for the players (hmm... is a member of the Heat a Calorie?) I would think lai X would be appropriate for a mass with a name (in fact, isn't that exactly what it means?) --mi'e .mark.
- No, it isn't. A named mass uses la, not lai: lai is appropriate for masses whose components share a name, as in lai djonz. = "the Joneses".