From cbmvax!uunet!cuvma.bitnet!LOJBAN Mon Dec 2 08:42:19 1991 Return-Path: Date: Mon Dec 2 08:42:19 1991 Message-Id: <9112020643.AA11811@relay1.UU.NET> Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: response on Lojban names 11/30/91 X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Ken Taylor Status: RO And writes: >But you have to know the language of a name before you can reconstruct >it from the lojban. I suppose that's better than the present system, in >which it is impossible to tell what someone's name is when it is >expressed in lojban. (E.g. la djan. kau,n. could be John Cow.) Not likely. He would more likely then have Lojbanized it as "kaun" with no comma. You can often tell a lot about a name by what the speaker does NOT do. It is NOT impossible to tell someone's name when expressed in Lojban. In your example, his name is "djan. kau,n." Now as to whether you can tell what his ENGLISH name is: well, yes, that could be a problem. So? Nick points out that if you care, you can use foreign text quotes and spell it the foreign way if that is important. But no method will easily resolve "Marian" vs. "Marion", either, or "Joe" and "Jo", or "Mary" and "Merry" (of Tolkien fame). If you are a person to whom the distinction in spelling is important you will Lojbanize so as to make the distinction clear, probably by matching the spelling. Likewise, some with the names "Ann" or "Anne" will Lojbanize their name as ".an.", some as ".en.", but if they have acquired the diminuitive nickname "Annie", they may alternate between ".an." and ".enis." In another message, I said that I Lojbanize my lastname as "leceval,ier." Actually, I also sometimes do it "leceVALi,er." which is slightly closer to my pronunciation. But if I want to match my pronunication in English, I would do more like "licyVALi,eis." (wishing that the person could treat the final as a triphthong as I pronounce it rather than mandatorily splitting it by pairs per the Lojban rules). But since I am pround of the heritage implied by my French name, I prefer to use a more Francophone spelling. Not accurate for the FRENCH version of the name which would have ultimate stress, but still preserving spelling and etymology. If you are transliterating a name from another language and do not know how it is pronounced, and cannot ask, it is wisest to preserve spelling, or to make conventional changes. I don't know how "Mr. Khan" pronounced his name, but I would transliterate it "genxis. xan." based on my conventions of mapping /ng/ to /n/, and /h/ and /kh/ to /x/. I would also do Edinburgh as "ednbrx.", or "Edinburx." (note the cap), and with no idea of pronunciation before it was discussed herein, iVAN's address as "rel. byklyx. cmaklaj." which mixes two Lojban names with one foreign one, or perhaps "pleis" if I were feeling timid. Nora independently confirms my approach on 'Edinburgh'. Ivan can drop the gender suffix on his last name - I could easily imagine however that some Slavic speakers would prefer to retain it as a sign of cultural identity. Ivan: by the way. How do you feel the stress-shifts on vowels in Slavic names should be handled? I've been told several times that the leader of the USSR should not be Lojbanized as "gorbatcof.", but rather more like "garbaTCAF." But this loses the Cyrillic visual recognition, perhaps unnecessarily, in the pursuit of perfection in sound. We did this kind of thing in gismu-making, and have been criticized because the result is actually lower in recognition because CONTRAST in vowels is lost in pursuit of accurate phonetic mapping. Chinese suffers even more. Some have even gone to unnatural lengths to preserve their cultural identity in their name. Kim Pizer, from the southern US, preferred her southern US drawl embedded in her name "ki,ym." to the 'obvious' "kim". Paul Francis O'Sullivan, proud of his Irish heritage, insisted on Lojbanizing his name as if it were Irish, giving something like "polfranCIIS. osuliebein." But that is NOT how he says his name when speaking English, of course. As to the final consonant in a vowel final name: I have no objection if people want to add a 'strange' consonant to make their name unique. But this seems unnatural to me, and also to those who have Lojbanized their names so far. Generally you WANT your name to sound like it came from your native language. One person whose name is Jay, has already expressed a preference to have his name Lojbanized to suggest "Jason", rather than to add some unique consonant that could be confused with some other name. My bottom line, I think is that And's original question: what is done in the Lojban culture so far, is that no effort is made for unambiguity with respect to the original name. Generally, people have seemed to prefer that their personal names conform more closely to their preferred pronunciation, which may not be their true pronunciation. I think that people are far less dogmatic with country names, street names, and names of other people that they are writing about and cannot expect to know the correct pronunciation - generally in these cases preferring to err towards visual recognition of the name. There is a slight tendancy towards loan-translation in foreign names with semantic content, as in the "Place" of Ivan's street address. (By the way, as an alternate answer to Dave Cortesi regarding the street number, I might use "la byklyx. cmaklaj. pe li re". I would be unlikely to use either cardinal or ordinal suffixes, reserving them for "2nd Avenue"). Colin's answer, using ordinals, might be valid in some limited situations where the numbers are actually consecutive and indicate position on the street. This is seldom the case in US addresses. Or maybe that should be "la'eli re po'e la byklyx. cmaklaj." That respresented by the number 2 inalienably associated with Buccleuch small-street. Mark Shoulson writes in response to John Cowan >> I forgot to mention that "gicbau" has to be "gicybau", and even "gicban." is >> suspect; there is an evolving policy (which may become firm) to avoid >> impermissible consonant clusters even in names. > >Um, I don't think that's such a hot idea. I know that there's a lot of >discussion about cmene going on now (I'm a litle behind in reading my >mail), so here's what I think: > >1) Lojban should place as few restrictions as possible on cmene. YHou >should have the right ti name yourself as close as possible to whatever >you want. Apart from conforming to orthography and those silly >"la/lai/doi" restrictions, we should really have nothing else. There is >some justification to doing "gicyban.", since that's a lojbanic (as >opposed to lojbanized) name, but if my name had an impermissible >cluster, I think I should have the right to use it. After all, that's >why we have buffer vowels. Now, this method would probably allow people >to pick names which are thoroughly unpronouncable by human equipment. >Which brings me to the other point: If your name has an impermissible cluster, then people will try to pronounce it will often succeed - incorrectly, assimilating per the rules of their native language. Marks's position seems especially strange, since he objects to doubled 'e' and to syllabic 't' in: >Several problems. first off, Lojban has no definition for the >pronunciation of two consecutive "e"'s (or two consecutive anythings, >for that matter, with the exception of "ii" and "uu"). Also, you cannot >have a pause inside a name. If you have a pause, it's a two-part name, >and each part must end in a consonant. Using a comma doesn't help in >this case, since a comma is a syllable break, and thus implies a sylable >consisting only of the "t". That sound is not considered syllabic in >Lojban, and I suspect you'd be hard-pressed to find a language in which >is *is* considered syllabic. By his argument: >2) Contrary to popular belief, the *real* authority in name-giving is >the *namer*, not the namee. So you SHOULD be able to do any of these if there are no restrictions on names. I feel that Mark's answer on "ee" is applicable to all such instances. Lojban has no defined pronunciation for an impermissible medial cluster. Therefore you shouldn't use one. If you do, you should be prepared to have you Lojbanic listener attempt to map what he/she hears to a valid Lojban phoneme string, thus by audiovisual isomorphism to a spelling different than you use, which will then be read differently by a third speaker. (Actually 'ee' has the defined pronunciation 'e,e', in Lojban.) I would say the same thing to a speaker of a language with aspirated consonants that argued for putting 'x' after each aspirated consonant. The speaker might argue that this comes closer to the way the speaker says the word, but how would a non-speaker deal with Hindi "bxarat." Buffering it loses whtever recognition benefit is gained by accuracy in contrast. I >DO< favor allowing some relaxations, including some additional syllabic consonants, strings of permissible medials that are not permissible initials at the beginnings of words "cprents." for Lojbanist Joel Shprentz, or "lau,dz." for Lao-Tse. Note that And's buffer vowel analysis that you can say ANYTHING as long as you buffer it is NOT official Lojban, but merely a proposal. THus you are NOT allowed to leave out /y/ hyphens between impermissible medials in lujvo even you could always add a buffer vowel. The idea is to MINIMIZE the use of buffering, for the very reasons And has criticized the buffer in previous postings (mostly on conlang): its phonetic value is dependent on the phoneme mappings of the speaker and listener. We are NOT trying to make the buffer the equivalent of the other vowels. >It should be noted that in the interests of courtesy the namer ought to >defer to the namee, but when push comes to shove, it's the one >speaking/using the name at the moment that is... well, speaking/using >it. If I chose to call George Bush "Murgatroyd", that would be somewhat >rude and very confusing to everyone, but that particular kind of >ambiguity is permitted in Lojban, and who has the right to tell me what >to say? I'm taking my chances of having you misunderstand, but that's >my risk to take. I agree, but with the additional caveat that in Lojban instruction we try to emphasize that it is the speaker's obligation to make statements understandable to the listener, who may be from a different cultural or metaphysical background, and only secondarily the listener's obligation to puzzle out the speaker's intent. I recognize that in reality, communication requires both parties to cooperate, but the speaker obligation paradigm is vital to learning to speak another language, as different as Lojban is, with hope of communicating. There will be some lists of names and countries and cultures in whatever constitutes our first 'dictionary'/'reference work', to help serve as examples. I am watching this discussion and will try to include some of the examples and conventions you people propose, especially those of you, like Ivan, who can give us authoritative views on what to do with names from some other cultures. Ivan writes: >From: "61510::GILSON" >> In British English, perhaps [{j} is absent as a word-final consonant]. >> Words like "garage," "camouflage," and >> "sabotage," in America at least have that sound word final. > >Same in British English, but these are not proper names. If you might Lojbanize "Place" rather than translate it, you might need to Lojbanize any other English word. I took my car last week to "la djoz. graj." And again: >Nick: >> From: And Rosta >> Subject: onomastic etiquette in lojban >> >When using a name in lojban one has to convert to lojban orthography. >> This is desirable, but not obligatory; one can use {la'o} and foreign quotes. > >Could you explain la'o, goi, gy. (& zoi, which I thought was used for >non Lojban quotes), or refer me to an explanation elsewhere? Do foreign >quotes allow > >(a) nonlojban romic characters >(b) non-romic characters? (E.g., Greek, Chinese) 1. Lojban quotes a. zo quotes a single morphological Lojban word (not orthographic: zo lenu only picks up the "le", so be careful) b. lu ... li'u quotes one or more Lojban word in text which is presumed by a parser to be (a) grammatical utterance(s) c. lo'u ... le'u quotes text which properly lexes into Lojban word(s), but is not presumed to be grammatical utterance. Treat like the linguist marks ? or * for questionable or incorrect grammaticality. d. zoi .[word]. text .[word]. delimited quotes, where [word] is any valid single Lojban word, often a name, or the first letter of a word. The text inside the quotes need not be Lojban lexically, grammatical or otherwise, but cannot contain [word] with pauses surrounding for obvious reasons (similar conflict resolution rules exist for other quotes). The "gy." in this case is the letteral "g", standing for "glico". Also oft used for English is "gic.", or "kuot." text can include things like whistles, music, animal sounds - whatever. e. la'o .[word]. name .[word]. effectively the same as "zoi" except that the result is interpreted as a name, rather than a quoted text. This was primarily introduce to resolve in written Lojban, such problems as giving Ivan's address, or "Goethe"s name in a form that it can be recognized visually without worrying about translation. Since I'm sure the UK postal system would have no idea what to do with "byxlyx. pleis.", this kind of thing is pragmatically vital. All of the above have the grammar of sumti 2. goi - is used for anaphora assignment of sumti, e.g. to free variables. It is like an assignment statement of a computer language, whereas its grammatical equivalent "po'u", the restrictive appositive is an equals sign or a definitional statement. goi works bi-directionally, in other words one side is an anaphora and the other is its assigned definition, but which is which is pragmatically determined. >> >(4) Is there some cmavo to mark nonce lojbanizations of cmene? I think >> >this could be used for politeness. >> The cmavo {za'e}, used to denote arbitrary word coinages, can readily be >> extended to this function. > >I thought so. I hope this will be noted by the grammarians at lojbocrat HQ. This has been part of the intent for za'e from the start. It is usable ANY time you make up or use a word and wish to flag for your listener that it may be nonstandard in definition or possibly meaning/place structure. This is poart of our solution for living free of dictionaries, even when one is written: if you suspect that a word might be in the dictionary and/or might have a place structure you don;t expect, or if you are Lojbanizing a name or borrowing in a potentially non-standard way, you can warn the listener. >The following ideas might be considered: > >_la_ is matched with a terminator, say _la'a_ (for argument's sake, >ignoring the real _la'a_, whatever it means). The *only* constraint on >names is that they can't contain /laha/. It follows from this that an >entire sentence, even one including names, can function as a name (e.g. >a title of a book), providing that la-la'a can nest. > >This idea is not only incontrovertibly brilliant [is there an UI meaning >'smiley'? - insert it here] but also characteristically lojbanic. "zo'o" > >No - wait - what would be even more lojbanic, though less elegant, would >be to keep the current arrangement but also add two new cmavo >"open-name" and "close-name". Congrats: you just reinvented "la'o" which has open and close delimiters of your choice since any delimiter we might choose could theoretically be found in a totally unconstrained name. Instead, you merely have to have a name that does not consist of ALL POSSIBLE Lojban words. I HOPE this is an acceptable limit zo'o. I will accept your compliment as to its brilliance zo'o, and compliment you for again thinking of it zo'o. This is one Lojban word you might remember xu? Ivan says to Colin: >> > if you need a standard, isn't {j} a much better one? Its chances >> > to be mistakenly stripped off the end of a lojbanised name are much >> > lower than those of {s}. >> > >> <...> There is something in me which is repelled by >> all those English names turning into > >But that is exactly how it must be. If a lojbanised English name sounds >drastically unEnglish, you'll know for sure that you must do something >(like stripping off the "repellent" last consonant) to it to get its >real form. But how do you know in LOJBAN text that it is a Lojbanized English name. If you want its Englishness identity preserved, use la'o quotes. If you want a LOJBAN name, then Lojbanize it, and thereafter try to forget that this name translates to English, while that one to Bulgarian while the other is a purely Lojban coining. "la" names are for LOjbanized, i.e. >Lojban< names. lojbab