Received: from VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (vms.dc.lsoft.com [205.186.43.2]) by locke.ccil.org (8.6.9/8.6.10) with ESMTP id FAA19554 for ; Wed, 15 Nov 1995 05:41:13 -0500 Message-Id: <199511151041.FAA19554@locke.ccil.org> Received: from PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM (205.186.43.4) by VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.0a) with SMTP id FB25D44F ; Wed, 15 Nov 1995 6:35:12 -0400 Date: Wed, 15 Nov 1995 10:36:18 GMT Reply-To: Don Wiggins Sender: Lojban list From: Don Wiggins Subject: Re: buffer vowel To: John Cowan Status: OR X-From-Space-Date: Wed Nov 15 05:41:14 1995 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU > But the poor people can't say > even that, they actually say KXY,LUO,DI,YA (Ke4Luo2Di4Ya4), and the > two-syllable long name of my city, Zagreb, that even the English > speaking folk pronounce without any difficulty, Chinese translate into > SA,GY,LY,BU (Sa4Ge4Le4Bu4), a four-syllable name. They just can't cope > with C clusters. These problems are related to the Chinese writing system rather than their ablity to pronounce consonant clusters. As you are probably aware, Chinese is a monosyllablic language and the ideographic system exploits this property. However, when foreign words with consonant clusters are to be represented there are no symbols which can be used. Hence the rather unwieldy transcriptions. One work-around used is to only part-transliterate and glue it to a concept word. This is typical for country names, e.g. America becomes mei4guo2 with mei4 (beautiful) from aMERica and guo2 for country, and England (which is synonmous with UK) ying1guo2 with ying1 (brave) from ENGland and guo2. co'o mi'e dn.