From arntrich@stud.ntnu.no Sat Aug 04 10:11:02 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: arntrich@stud.ntnu.no X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_2_0); 4 Aug 2001 17:11:02 -0000 Received: (qmail 82202 invoked from network); 4 Aug 2001 17:11:01 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by l8.egroups.com with QMQP; 4 Aug 2001 17:11:01 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO due.stud.ntnu.no) (129.241.56.71) by mta3 with SMTP; 4 Aug 2001 17:11:00 -0000 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by due.stud.ntnu.no (Postfix) with ESMTP id 142CE17C23 for ; Sat, 4 Aug 2001 19:10:58 +0200 (CEST) Received: from jeeves.stud.ntnu.no (jeeves [129.241.56.14]) by due.stud.ntnu.no (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5E1C517C05 for ; Sat, 4 Aug 2001 19:10:57 +0200 (CEST) Received: from localhost (arntrich@localhost) by jeeves.stud.ntnu.no (8.10.0.Beta12/8.10.0.Beta12) with ESMTP id f74HAwr15806 for ; Sat, 4 Aug 2001 19:10:58 +0200 (MEST) X-Authentication-Warning: jeeves.stud.ntnu.no: arntrich owned process doing -bs Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2001 19:10:58 +0200 (MEST) To: Subject: Re: [lojban] Transliterations survey In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE X-Virus-Scanned: by AMaViS perl-10 From: Arnt Richard Johansen X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 9159 The ASCII IPA mapping scheme I use in this message is SAMPA. > Please evaluate as voluminously as you can the following candidate > transliterations. Please only comment on an instance if you know the exact > pronunciation of the original. Feel free to try these on > mundanes^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hnon-Lojbanists. Ignore the fact that some of these > are not legal cmene. Anecdotes about transliterations of these placenames > in your native languages are also welcome. In many of the examples below, one of the candidate transliterations have a diphthong where the original has a diphthong. I feel very strongly against this. I'm not sure whether it's because it complicates matters unnecessarily, or because of the Norwegian cultural bias that says that monophthongs are the only true vowels, and diphthongs are merely combinations of monophthongs. > Muenchen (=3D Munich), Germany > munxen. > miunxen. > minxen. To me, all of them are unacceptable. The palatal fricative in "M=FCnchen" sounds closer to "c" than to "x". It is more difficult to decide whether we want to retract the close-central vowel ("=FC") to Lojban /u/, or advanc= e it to /i/. I'd say we go for "u", as it parallels the orthographic appearance of the original name. Thus: "muncen.". > Koeln (=3D Cologne), Germany > koln. > kioln. > keln. When a non-linguistically-trained Norwegian hears the schwa in a stressed position, it sounds as the Norwegian /=F8/ (slashed o), which is almost exactly the same as the German /=F6/. I don't know how acceptable "kyln." sounds to Germans, but if that doesn't do it, we end up with a draw between two Lojban phonemes, /e/ and /o/, which are both equally wrong. "koln." may have a slight edge here, as well, since it looks more like the original. > Fukushima, Japan > fukucima. > fikicima. > fykycima. Most probably "fukucimas.". I don't actually know Japanese, but the thing with the Japanese 'u', as I remember it from my undergraduate course in phonetics and _The handbook of the IPA_, is that it is not quite central, but somewhere between central and back. The unroundedness of the Japanese 'u' is also not big enough, I believe, to warrant throwing it all the way forward to /i/. > Bourgogne (=3D Burgundy), France > burGON. > burGONiy. > burGOIN. "burGON." If we can get by with only /n/ for all nasals from dental to velar, why should a simple secondary articulation such as palatalization deter us from expressing it as /n/? > Marseilles, France > marSEL. > marSELiy. > marSEIL. > marSEI. In Norway, we say the latter one. (Actually, we say [mA'S{i], but that'sbeside the point.) I don't know if it's because that's the way the French do it, or because the Norwegian phonotactics forbid a palatal lateral to occur after a long vowel. --=20 mu'o mi'e tsali