[lojban-beginners] Re: My Intro...with a request for help as a bonus.

["Marjorie Scherf" <mls1@rice.edu>]

-----Original Message-----
From: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org
[mailto:lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org] On Behalf Of Matt Arnold
Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2007 9:46 AM
To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: My Intro...with a request for help as a
bonus.

On 9/27/07, Marjorie Scherf <mls1@rice.edu> wrote:
> Eppcott,
> How can you type {wybu} in lojban if there is no 'w'?
> mu'omi'e .skaryzgik.
>

We don't. Lojban does not use the 'w' character of the keyboard.
{wybu} is a Lojban way to talk about a glyph that exists in langauges
other than Lojban, just like talking about Greek or Cyrillic glyphs.

The only glyphs of of Lojban are:

abcdefg  ijklmnop  rstuv xyz '

No 'h', 'q', or 'w'.

The sound like English 'w' happens in Lojban when the 'u' character
(pronounced 'oo') is connected to another vowel in one of these
configurations: ua ue ui uo uu iu au (wah, wheh, wee, whoah, woo, you,
ow)

By the way, the only time the English sound of the character 'y' is
used in Lojban works the same way. ia ie ii io iu ei ai oi ui (yah,
yeh, yee, yoe, you, A, eye, oy, wee). The 'y' glyph is not used for
this in Lojban. In Lojban that letter makes an 'uh' sound.

-Eppcott


There is also . and , which aren't exactly letters in the same sense of the
others, but they're still listed as part of the alphabet, but that's not
really my point. How can {wybu} be a Lojban way to talk about something if
it uses a letter we don't have? How is it even allowed? Or possible?

Also, I think CLL recommends {vy.bu} to name the alien letter 'w'.

One of my favorite things about .ybu is that when it is in the penultimate
syllable, the stress goes to the third to last syllable because .ybu can
never have the stress. Sometimes I use long rafsi in lujvo (and cmevla based
on them) for precisely that reason. However, it is at times unfortunate that
it is illegal in fu'ivla because I was trying to make one for kazoo, and
zgikrkazu sounds a little strange to someone used to hearing kazoo with the
stress on the first of those two syllables. But such things happen in
word-borrowing so it's not all that big of a deal.

mu'omi'e .skaryzgik.