[lojban-beginners] Re: towns and countries

[Nathaniel Krause <nathanielkrause@yahoo.com>]

My general impression is that Lojban always (almost always?) prefers to transcribe (as closely as possible in Lojban phonology) names from the local pronunciation. Attempting to approximately transliterate the local spelling wouldn't be a crazy idea, but I don't recall noticing it done (on the other hand, maybe I have seen it but I assumed it was an error).

Places with varying local names do present a problem in this scheme, which I  don't have a catch-all solution for. In the case of Belgium, I use {belgik}, from the Latin root which is the common source of the French and Flemish names. In the case of Korea, I use {gorios}, from an archaic local name (therefore less controversial, I think), which is also the root of the country's "international" name. I don't have a satisfying solution for Jerusalem/al-Quds. My initial suggestion would be to look which name is more widely-used in the rest of the world, and also at which name is older; this would tend to favour
 a Lojbanisation based on "Jersusalem". You might also try some sort of historical or etymological name.

mu'o mi'e .sen.

Yoav Nir <yoav.nir@gmail.com> wrote:

I think that using a language like that does not facilitate
communications very well. If I refer to the city of {ierucalai,im},
few Americans or Englishmen would recognize Jerusalem. Similarly, if
English-speaking people write {florens} or {neipyls}, Italians might
not recognize Firenze or Napoli, and if I write about the country
{tsarfat}, no Frenchman is going to recognize that.

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: Ð?аÑ?иÑ? Ð?аÑ?манова
> 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
> third
> language after Russian and German, so I have a question: when I
> lojbanize a name of a country or a town, what pronounsation schould
> i use as
> base? 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?

---

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