[lojban-beginners] Re: Preliminary chapter 1 for Lojban learners

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

On Wednesday 18 March 2009 08:59:42 Michael Turniansky wrote:
>   Says who?  Unlike cmavo, stress may in fact be the only difference
> in cmevla  between two differently named things.  If I have one friend
> named BArux, and another name baRUX, I can distinguish them in speech
> by use of stress, and I can distinguish them in writing by use of
> capitals.  And if I don't choose to use the capitals, then the refgram
> says it's the former, not the latter, that I must be talking about.
> (Chapter 4, section 8: "Names may have almost any form, but always end
> in a consonant, and are followed by a pause. They are penultimately
> stressed, unless unusual stress is marked with capitalization.")

Two names can also be distinguished by tone or by two sounds that are 
allophones in Lojban. There are two Chinese provinces called "Shanxi" in 
different tones (in English one is spelled "Shaanxi", but it's a difference 
in tone, not vowel length). There are Ming (a dynasty, and someone I knew) 
and Min (a group of Chinese dialects). And some languages (e.g. French, in 
some analyses, though I grew up with final stress) have neither stress nor 
tone. If words with no stress indicated have penultimate stress, how do you 
indicate no stress?

Pierre