From nicholas@uci.edu Sat Aug 04 22:36:25 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: nicholas@uci.edu X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_2_0); 5 Aug 2001 05:36:24 -0000 Received: (qmail 53813 invoked from network); 5 Aug 2001 05:36:24 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l7.egroups.com with QMQP; 5 Aug 2001 05:36:24 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO e4e.oac.uci.edu) (128.200.222.10) by mta2 with SMTP; 5 Aug 2001 05:36:24 -0000 Received: from localhost (nicholas@localhost) by e4e.oac.uci.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id WAA12092; Sat, 4 Aug 2001 22:36:24 -0700 (PDT) X-Authentication-Warning: e4e.oac.uci.edu: nicholas owned process doing -bs Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2001 22:36:24 -0700 (PDT) X-Sender: To: Cc: Nick NICHOLAS Subject: Re: [lojban] Transliterations survey Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: Nick NICHOLAS X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 9208 Before I come back to this issue, a little anecdote of my own on Modern Greek transliteration. Words Greek borrowed from Turkish used diphthongs for front rounded vowels, and killed the rounding on I, Cowan-style. Thus: Karago"z (hero of shadow puppet shows, cultural equivalent of Punch & Judy or Mickey Mouse) -- Karagiozis Ku"tahi (name) -- Kioutaxis HanIm 'lady' -- Xanoumissa 'harem girl' Words Greek borrowed from French and German used monophtongs, killing the rounding. These were borrowed later and in written form, of course; and are usually spelled in such a way as to try and remind the reader of the original anyway: Duesseldorf -- Diseldorf (spelled Ntysselntorf) Goethe -- Gete (spelled Gkaite, because ai is the only digraph that sounds like /e/) calorifeur 'heater' -- kalorifer (spelled kalorifer, because French has the e in there already anyway.) Greek has a palatal l (though not word-finally); however, it prefers to render the French palatal l as soft-gamma [IPA j-curl, here J], the front allophone of gamma [here G]: Maquillage 'makeup' -- [maciJaz] /makiGiaz/ Mille-feuille 'a kind of sweet' -- [milfeiJ] /milfeiG/ Most non-Greeks hear its J as IPA j ([Janis] /Gianis/ > Yannis), which may make things a little clearer. (So: these are roughly 'makiyaz', 'milfeiy' in English.) In Greek, palatals are front allophones of velars. (Allophones are positional variants of sounds, depending on what sounds surround them. For example, the n in 'in the meadow' and 'in chastity' are quite different, because the tongue moves to the same place as 'th' and 'ch', respectively. Most of you did not know that, and assumed they were both just n's. According to linguistics, you're right: they're different allophones of the same phoneme.) This means that a Greek will say [cipros], and mean /kipros/ 'Cyprus'. ([IPA c] is the palatal voiceless stop, which Albanian writes as __q__.) It also means an Albanian is perfectly within his rights to borrow the word as _Qipro_. But a Greek will be confused if they see anything but __Kipro__. And though the 'g' in Vangelis is exactly the same sound as the 'gy' in Magyaro*r*szag ([vaFelis], [mAFarorsag], where F is IPA upside-down F), be assured that Greeks think of that sound as a g -- the same sound, that is, as in Vangos [vagos], the pet form of Vangelis. In Greek dialects, in fact, palatals go to palato-alveolars. So an Athenian will say not [kenedi] but [cenedi], and a Cretan villager will say [tSenedi] (Lojban tcenedi.) But as far as they're concerned, they're still saying the underlying form /kenedi/. This to me implies that Cyprus should be in Lojban kipros, not kiipros, tiipros, or even worse (using the local pronunciation) djipros. Similarly, I would have to advocate minxen rather than mincen: the ich-laut is a variant of the ach-laut, and x will make Germans think ch; c will make them think sch. One more thing is that canonical does tend to imply (to me) canonical according to the local hegemony, rather than the local form. That means minxen rather than minge, niu,orlynz. rather than nolinz., and (much more contentiously) timicuara (Rumanian) rather than temecvar (Hungarian). I know full well this is not going to be looked on favourably. OK, talk amongst yourselves for a while... :-) -- == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == Nick Nicholas, Breathing {le'o ko na rivbi fi'inai palci je tolvri danlu} nicholas@uci.edu -- Miguel Cervantes tr. Jorge LLambias