On 5/23/07, komfo,amonan <komfoamonan@gmail.com> wrote:
> Perhaps there ought to be a natlang-Lojban phoneme mapping system for names.
It'd be ahead of English, which has semi-standardised transliterations
for some languages, but you still get "Muhammad" vs. "Mohammed", etc.
Not to mention that then you'd have to worry about dialects -- would
it be acceptable to use a one-size-fits-all mapping from, say, Greek
for the name of someone who pronounces his name in his native dialect
not with /dz/ (as in "adze") but with /dZ/ (as in "edge") instead? In
which case, {la .opuDJIS.} would arguably be better than the {la
.opuDZIS.} you'd probably get from a standardised,
based-on-the-standard-dialect, mapping.
In cases where we have access to a person's pronunciation of his/her own name, that should indeed be the basis of Lojbanization. But most Lojbanised cmene will be of dead people and place names. I actually think that, in those cases, *starting* with standardised, based-on-the-standard-dialect mapping is advantageous. Ideally we would get a consensus of Shona Lojbanists for Shona names, and a consensus of Tamil Lojbanists for Tamil names. But in most cases that's not going to happen. A mapping system may minimize the number of Lojban variants for such names that arise when non-native speakers take cracks at them (I'm a little sensitive to variants). mu'o mi'e komfo,amonan