I believe we do need a standardized way of writing location names. The easy way is to transcribe one language (such as English as spoken in Texas) and use that, but that's not very culturally neutral. Another way is to follow the natives' pronounciation. That means that the capital of France would be {paRIs} and the capital of the UK would be {landen}. That creates a whole new set of problems, because everybody is used to seeing the common spelling (London) and {landen} looks plain strange. Also, some places are known around the world by a different name (often historical) than the name the natives use. Germany is known by its inhabitants as {doitclend}. And one more thing, even the natives are sometimes divided: {ierucalai,im} is known by its Arab population as either {urucalim} or {alKUDS}.
So I do think we need standardized names to facilitate communication, but my best suggestion is to start with the native pronounciation, and change that when there's a sufficiently large group of Lojban-speakers in that place. For example, the capital of the UK might be better spelled (and pronounced!) as {london} - this is both more familiar visually, and it aligns with how many non-English people say that name.
On Jan 5, 2008, at 1:05 PM, Isen hand wrote:
I would use whatever I would Use! Or in your case whatever pronunciation you would use. So, you would write it using your native Russian pronunciation and I using my native English pronunciation (adding an "s" on the end). The thing with pronunciation is it differs from place to place even within a country. Take for example the Englsih city of Bath. Even in England there are 4 differnet ways to pronounce it.----- Original Message ---- From: Мария Карманова <fjotra@yandex.ru> To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Sent: Saturday, 5 January, 2008 11:00:04 AM Subject: [lojban-beginners] towns and countries Hello!My name is Mari, I study lojban since December. But English is my thirdlanguage after Russian and German, so I have a question: when Ilojbanize a name of a country or a town, what pronounsation schould i use asbase? For example, Moscow can be la moskou., but when I translate from Russian it can be la moskwAs. And Russia: la racas. or la rosIas?