Subject: Re: coi rodo - mi'e .aulun.

From: "Alfred W. Tüting" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 16:13:36 -0000

> The short form of what I can eventually put up is that /e/
generally mapped 
> to schwa which by the pattern of other languages we mapped to
Lojban a - we 
> should have instead mapped it back to Lojban e for Chinese.

Mapping it to schwa wouldn't have been too bad an idea:
pinyin "le" (W.-G. "lo") is somewhat between lb "luy" and "ly" - the
latter perhaps being bit closer (e.g. emperor "Yung-lo" py: 
"yong3 le4" ¥Ã¼Ö i.e. "eternal joy")
pinyin "luo" (W.-G. "lo") is between lb "luo" and "lo" - closer to
the first, about like English: "lwo (e.g. Luoma Ã¹°¨ "Rome")
pinyin "he" (W.-G. "ho") is a bit different, about lb "xy" (e.g. py
"he2" ªe "river(s)" - north of the Huai).

For building gismu, there are far too many schwa in Chinese words.

> I have several special cases including /iu/ and /iou/ mapping to
Lojban iyu, /iong/ to 
> Lojban un(g)

lb "iyu" is not bad for py "iu" because words like "liu" (e.g. py:
"liu4" ¤» "six") are a bit like "liou/leou".
pinyin "-ui" (e.g. kui, gui, sui etc.) would go well by lb "-uyi"
because a bit like "-uei" (hence W.-G.: kuei ¶Q "precious/
honourable).
py "-iong/yong" should be lb "iun."

pinyin "shun" (English pron. rather "shwun" or even "shwuen) maybe
could be written in lb by "cuyn".

This is all pretty complicated/sophisticated thinking of French "le"
or German/Hungarian/Turkish umlauts (should transcribe my 
second name with "umlaut" u or i??? Easter European speakers tend to
say "i" (except the Russians pronouncing, and even writing 
"iu" instead (e.g. their German-Russian word "bjustgalter", German:
"BŸstenhalter" engl. "bra(ssiere)")

> We used the rules we inherited from JCB, the inventor of the 
> language, and those rules by and large treated all languages
equally. This 
> was not wise for Chinese for one reason (the bad sound mappings)
and Arabic 
> for a different reason (in Arabic, the vowels have little
sound/meaning 
> significance, while the consonants and their order are vital). 
Russian 
> suffered from its tendency towards long words, even after we
dropped 
> declension endings. As a result, Hindi, English, and Spanish are
somewhat 
> more effectively represented (unfortunately our Hindi scholarship
was 
> probably the weakest of our 6 languages though).

Also, Chinese (Mandarin) phonologically is pretty poor to get good
material from (Hungarian would have been fine with lots of 
short and distinct vocabulary - although a 'small' language - it is
really great! :( Also in a lojban sense.

I should have to stick to learning some more Lojban now, instead of
always hanging around writing long postings ;))

Thanks for your instructions

c'o mi'e .aulun.