At 10:41 PM 05/27/2000 +0000, Alfred W. Tüting wrote:
Jorge, thanks for the infos. O.K., it's quite clear now how the Chinese transcription can be done: Unaspirated/aspirated consonant pairs should be written about as in pinyin: djuan/tcuan (pinyin: zhuan/chuan) djin/tcin (pinyin: jin/qin) dz./ts. (pinyin: zi/ci) dzy/tsy ( (pinyin: ze/ce) and (no pairs existing): cy (pinyin: she) c. (pinyin: shi W.-G.: shih) sy (pinyin: se) s. (pinyin: si) y, y-, -y,-y- ( (pinyin: -e etc.): as in y, yn, ly, uyn, fyn. (pinyin: e, en, le = ¼Ö, wen, feng)
When we made the Lojban gismu, we had as a tool a publication of the Chinese government giving their preferred IPA equivalents for the pinyin characters, which we mapped to their nearest Lojban equivalent. There is a complete such chart.
I could post this (and/or put it on the website). Unfortunately, this official mapping led to severe collision because so many pinyin letters mapped to schwa; we also did not at the time understand how C+i sounded (e.g. pinyin "zi"), though I have since had this clarified.
If we had it to do over again, we would map "ong" to "on(g?)" and not to "yn". The g is questionable because Lojban maps the /ng/ consonant to /n/. As someone noted, if the g is present it is pronounced separately from the n. But the real problem is that in gismu making we could have ended up with the g and not the n in the Lojban word, and the g by itself without the n is probably useless to a Chinese speaker for recognition.
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