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Re: [lojban] Translating names
At 04:58 AM 03/22/2000 -0500, pycyn@aol.com wrote:
The final consonant and the pause are needed for segmentation purposes but
are not otherwise significant. Nor, in Lojban, is the choice of final
consonant; in Loglan, -s is required in borrowed or constructed names that
would end in a vowel.
I don't recall him ever saying 's' was required, but it is one he used
commonly. As you note, he also used 'n' a lot.
I suspect that JCB used -s because, as suggested, it
was familiar, but also because he took it to be a minimal addition (talking
about {romas} for Rome, he notes how little the mere -s would bother a Roman,
though he is contrasting it with the effect of dropping the last syllable.
He makes a similar comment about {paRIS} for French). Lojban's preference
for s probably is inherited. The preference for n probably is, too; it
appeared in constructed names first where it was vaguely justified
({loglentan, the last element from {takna}) then where it was not. It was
also used to make names out of cmavo ({nen}, One). Again this is familiar
and minimal (in some sense) and, I suspect, the symmetry of {nen}, the most
common case, was appealing to JCB. Both of these rules or patterns might
have been generalized in Lojban's more relaxed atmosphere.
There was one other conscious reason for MY using "n". This was also a
conscious letter choice in a small number of gismu that were made wherein
it did not matter what consonant was chosen in a given position; I later
regretted this because of rafsi collisions. It is a syllable-ending
consonant that is phonologically acceptable in many languages that prefer
to avoid CVC syllables. It therefore probably sounds more pleasant to a
speaker of such languages.
In addition, because of the mapping of Chinese phonemes it is also the most
common syllable ending consonant in Lojban, with r and s and c also in
there. Thus rafsi using n are common and names built to emulate lujvo or
to chop a character off a gismu will tend to end in these letters (JCB's
dog's name: "cimr"). I think that s and c occur so much in the language
that I get sibilant-tired, and so I avoid using them in names. I don't
know why I never end names with 'r'.
lojbab
----
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)