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Re: [lojban] RECORD:translating names
At 03:00 PM 04/13/2000 +0300, Ivan A Derzhanski wrote:
Why is that? Well, /f/ is a recent acquisition in Slavic; /v/
started life as a glide (it does after all go back to PIE _w_),
and while it didn't have a voiced counterpart, it was in all
respects an entity of the same category as /l/ and /r/. When
/f/ became a phoneme in its own right, /v/ became phonetically
a paired voiced fricative, but phonologically it kept its old
sonorant status.
The best lojbanisation is probably {u}: {moskuA}.
That was exactly what I was going to say after reading the last paragraph!
Note that only one of the six Lojban source languages, English,
has /f/:/v/ as a full-fledged pair of fricatives. Of the rest,
* only Chinese, Arabic and Spanish have /f/ as a common sound;
in Russian and Hindi it is almost restricted to loanwords
(and many Hindi speakers pronounce [p{h}] in its stead);
* only Russian has /v/, and even there it is not a genuine
voiced fricative. The closest thing is /B/ in Spanish,
/w/ in the rest.
(Granted that in this particular respect Spanish is not typical
of the Romance branch.)
Note that the inclusion of f/v pair was a) traditional to Loglan, but more
importantly was in that first weekend of Lojban design an explicit decision
to maximize voiced/unvoiced pairings in a symmetric way (i.e. blame it on
Gary Burgess and Tommy Whitlock %^). We came very close to including the
voiced velar in parallel to x as a result, but I think decided against it
more as a matter of how hard it would be to teach it, given that x was
itself going to be hard to teach.
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!)