Subject: Re: [lojban] World-historical and religious figures in Lojban

From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email-masked]>
Date: 28 Aug 2000 01:12:44 -0000

>From: Pierre Abbat <[email-masked]>
>Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 17:31:20 -0400
>
>On Fri, 25 Aug 2000, [email-masked] wrote:
>li'o
>> As for Caesar, since we know pretty well how he would have said it and this 
>>knnowledge is pretty widely disseminated, I suspect we go with iulius 
>>kaisar. Having just read a novel in which Jesus appears in Aramaic, Greek, 
>>Latin and both P- and Q-Celtic, I find that harder, but come down on balance 
>>for iecuys.
>
>I suggest iecu,ys. Without the slaka bu the uys sounds like "wuss", making y a
>full vowel and u a semivowel, the opposite of the way it's pronounced in
>Hebrew. What did the Celts say?

I wondered about this when you said it before. True, a pattach g'nuvah is
epenthetic in origin in Hebrew, and true, it does not carry the stress, but
it is still written as a full vowel, and moreover generally participates in
the phonology of the language as a full vowel, not as a half-vowel. This
shows up in the way it affects the biblical cantillations, which are
sensitive to word-structures. I think there are times when they're treated
as half-vowels, but on the whole they really are full vowels, just
unstressed (even as final syllables are normally unstressed in Lojban).

~mark