Subject: RECORD:translating names

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 12:16:56 EDT

"There are nine and ninety ways of writing tribal lays, and every single one 
of them is right" and the same applies, pretty much, to Lojban names, as 
Cowan points out. Except for the phonological exclusions (which wreak havoc 
with Sherlock Holmes fans and many French descendants), just about anything 
between {la}/{doi} and a pause will work. If a mass of verbiage is used to 
refer to or summon someone/thing, then slapping it into that frame makes it a 
legitmate name -- with the grammatical proviso that, if it is not 
interpretable as Lojban, it ends in a consonant. So, {la} really does mean 
something close to {la'e lu...li'u} with some language specfic constraints.

The final consonant and the pause are needed for segmentation purposes but 
are not otherwise significant. Nor, in Lojban, is the choice of final 
consonant.
But what to do in a particular case? Names -- in English, say -- fall into 
two classes: transparent and opaque (dare I use that word in a new context?) 
and transparent into two subgroups, applicable and not. Transparent names 
are names that have a meaning in the language, like "Smith" or "Brown" or 
"Johnson." Applicable names are ones where that meaning actually applies to 
the referent and is used for that referent because it applies (I won't insist 
on this second clause). In English, last names are often transparent, though 
not often applicable any more; first names are usually opaque -- in English, 
however transparent they may be in, say, Hebrew. This seems to be pretty 
generally the case in European languages; most other places I know about seem 
to have meaningful names throughout and even some drive toward applicablity 
(at least as a wish) for the part that is conventional (the individual name, 
as opposed to the inherited one). Nick names tend to be transparent and 
applicable (in a projected sense at least, maybe involving a wish or a long 
story: a baseball player was called "Alby" because albumin was found in his 
urine in a physical exam -- and this led to speculation about what he had 
been up to recently). All of this is leading up to a suggestion about what 
name to use for a person when moving into Lojban from the home language. In 
general, I think, opaque names come over simply in transliteration: my "John" 
is {djan}, not some translation of whatever "Jokhanon" means in Hebrew 
(though what to do in the case of John son of Zebedee, for whom all us Johns 
are ultimately named?). But applicable transparent names, particularly when 
they are going to actually be applied, should be translated. Thus, the 
family name Bear would be just {ber} in most cases, but the nickname Bear for 
a person whose stocky build, hirsuteness and what not was to the fore, would 
be {cribe}. And if the applicability was not to the fore, then {cribeC} or 
even {crib} Remember God introduces himself as la nu mi zaste when it comes 
time to make the point.

Names taken from a particular language try to mimic that language as closely 
as possible in Lojban, even to the point of violating some Lojban rules. 
Thus, the Lojban name for the capital of Russia might well be Moskvas (old 
habits die hard) despite the usual illegality of -kv- in Lojban. Similarly, 
small children are allowed to make "errors," so that calling a mother ma or 
mama can be overlooked until the age when mam or mat or matma can be required.

None of this is even chalked on stone, but it seems a reasonable approach to 
deal with the various that names play.