From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Thu Jul 31 04:36:56 2008 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:36:56 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1KOWSm-00058s-8O for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:36:56 -0700 Received: from cpe-071-075-215-096.carolina.res.rr.com ([71.75.215.96] helo=ixazon.dynip.com) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1KOWSi-00058Q-M5 for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:36:56 -0700 Received: from chausie (chausie.ixazon.lan [192.168.7.4]) by ixazon.dynip.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 72C76D4C3E for ; Thu, 31 Jul 2008 07:36:45 -0400 (EDT) From: Pierre Abbat To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Lojban - really for beginners Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 07:36:33 -0400 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.6 References: <988763.30038.qm@web30403.mail.mud.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <988763.30038.qm@web30403.mail.mud.yahoo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by Ecartis Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200807310736.34266.phma@phma.optus.nu> X-Spam-Score: 2.2 X-Spam-Score-Int: 22 X-Spam-Bar: ++ X-archive-position: 737 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: phma@phma.optus.nu Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners On Thursday 31 July 2008 02:31:42 Tom Gysel wrote: > I am fascinated by Lojban and I like the simple structure of it. > Simplicity... So I started learning the course on: > http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/book1.html I'm > having fun doing it. > I have a few questions, could you please help me with them? So far they're > still very basic questions... and should be very easy to anwer. > > My questions are about cmene. > > 1. if you write and say Maria: la mari,as. why not just write la maRIas. ? It's possible, since the stressed I next to the unstressed a means that they're in two different syllables. Me, I think that accents (la marí,as) look better than capital letters in the middle of words. But the orthography was codified before Unicode, and the ways of sorting characters were not as advanced as they are now. There are some languages, such as isiXhosa, in which non-initial capitals are common. In that word, "Xhosa" is capitalized because it's proper, but "isi", a declensional prefix for languages, is not. > 2.Why are there 3 ways of showing that a word is a cmene? We've got the > 'la', then there is the -s (or other consonant) at the end, and finally > there is the full stop. Isn't that a bit too much? We don't need 3 ways, do > we? Some people leave off the dot. It's not actually needed if there's a space. I think the dots should be written, as they make it easier to find names and beginnings of sentences by eye. The "la" is needed to distinguish a single name consisting of two or more words from several names in a row. For instance, "la feliks.ufuet.buaniis. la kot.divuár. pamoi jatna". A brivla can be used as a name, by using "la" as the article instead of "le". For instance, "la kot.divUAR. du la xantyde'i xaskoi". > 3.How do you actually PRONOUNCE la .iulias. ? Do you pronounce the 'la'? do > you the proonounce the -s? Yes and yes. > 4. And I guess this was a mistake in that course: there is written: > .uacintyn. Written like that I would put the stress on the 'cin'. Wouldn't > we have to write is as .uAcintyn. ? The rule for stress in brivla is that it's on the next-to-last syllable whose nucleus is not "y" or a syllabic consonant. Applying that rule to "uacintyn", it's stressed on "ua". But names can have "y" in the last syllable, "y" in both of two adjacent syllables, and "iy" and "uy", none of which can occur in brivla. I'm not sure that anyone's codified the default stress for these cases. So to be safe, if either of the last two syllables contains "y", indicate the stress. Pierre