From slobin@ice.ru Fri Jul 28 09:33:07 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 18351 invoked from network); 28 Jul 2000 16:33:07 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 28 Jul 2000 16:33:07 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO fair.ice.ru) (213.128.193.52) by mta1 with SMTP; 28 Jul 2000 16:33:05 -0000 Received: from localhost (slobin@localhost) by fair.ice.ru (8.9.3/8.9.3/Debian/GNU) with ESMTP id UAA14807 for ; Fri, 28 Jul 2000 20:33:02 +0400 Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2000 20:33:02 +0400 (MSD) To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: lojban and unix in different languages Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: Cyril Slobin X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 3702 la djan cusku di'e: > When I first heard of it, I pronounced it /lojban/; why not? > This seems a good point to ask one of my favorite questions: how is > "Unix" pronounced in various languages? "lojban" is still [LOJban] in Russian - standart pronuncation is quite acceptaple. I myself tend to mispronounce it as [lojBAN], but this is my own idiosyncrasy - Russian language has no fixed stress and therefore both versions are possible. You should just know a right answer - there is no way to guess. Considering this, it can be interesting to show this word spelled in Cyrillic letters but without stress marked to big enough set of people and collect statistics: how much of them guess LOJban and how much miss (like me) to lojBAN? And about Unix: when people are serious, they pronounce is like lojban cmene [IUniks] - I believe this is close enough to English (although my English pronuncation is terrific - in fact I do not speak it, but only read an in some extent write). But there is very popular joke originated from Soviet Era (when the difference between "us" (soviet) and "them" (all the other world) was almost unbreakable): to read "unix" as [u.nix] (again I use lojban for transcription - I just do not know ascii IPA), which means "by them", and contrasted to [u.nas] - "by us", whih was for (hypotetical) Soviet clone of Unix that should be better then original one. It is important to realize that Cyrillic letter for sound [x] is shaped exactly as latin letter 'x' (Russian is malylojbo? ;-). The joke seems to be obsolete nowadays, but many newcomers to Linux world still call it [LInux] - albeit this is considered silly. [co'o mi'e kir. noi djica je troci lenu roda poi xatra do ke'axire de zo'u su'o jufra be fi la lojban. cu pagbu de] -- Cyril Slobin