[lojban-beginners] Re: Lojban - really for beginners

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Thursday 31 July 2008 02:31:42 Tom Gysel wrote:
> I am fascinated by Lojban and I like the simple structure of it.
> Simplicity... So I started learning the course on:
> http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/book1.html I'm
> having fun doing it.
> I have a few questions, could you please help me with them? So far they're
> still very basic questions... and should be very easy to anwer.
>
> My questions are about cmene.
>
> 1. if you write and say Maria: la mari,as. why not just write la maRIas. ?

It's possible, since the stressed I next to the unstressed a means that 
they're in two different syllables. Me, I think that accents (la marí,as) 
look better than capital letters in the middle of words. But the orthography 
was codified before Unicode, and the ways of sorting characters were not as 
advanced as they are now.

There are some languages, such as isiXhosa, in which non-initial capitals are 
common. In that word, "Xhosa" is capitalized because it's proper, but "isi", 
a declensional prefix for languages, is not.

> 2.Why are there 3 ways of showing that a word is a cmene? We've got the
> 'la', then there is the -s (or other consonant) at the end, and finally
> there is the full stop. Isn't that a bit too much? We don't need 3 ways, do
> we?

Some people leave off the dot. It's not actually needed if there's a space. I 
think the dots should be written, as they make it easier to find names and 
beginnings of sentences by eye.

The "la" is needed to distinguish a single name consisting of two or more 
words from several names in a row. For instance, "la feliks.ufuet.buaniis. la 
kot.divuár. pamoi jatna".

A brivla can be used as a name, by using "la" as the article instead of "le". 
For instance, "la kot.divUAR. du la xantyde'i xaskoi".

> 3.How do you actually PRONOUNCE la .iulias. ? Do you pronounce the 'la'? do
> you the proonounce the -s?

Yes and yes.

> 4. And I guess this was a mistake in that course: there is written:
> .uacintyn. Written like that I would put the stress on the 'cin'. Wouldn't
> we have to write is as .uAcintyn. ?

The rule for stress in brivla is that it's on the next-to-last syllable whose 
nucleus is not "y" or a syllabic consonant. Applying that rule to "uacintyn", 
it's stressed on "ua". But names can have "y" in the last syllable, "y" in 
both of two adjacent syllables, and "iy" and "uy", none of which can occur in 
brivla. I'm not sure that anyone's codified the default stress for these 
cases. So to be safe, if either of the last two syllables contains "y", 
indicate the stress.

Pierre