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Re: [lojban] gismu etymology
At 02:08 PM 3/3/03 +0100, Pierre Abbat wrote:
On Monday 03 March 2003 12:56, Craig wrote:
> >> Is there data for this stuff somewhere?
> >
> >The nitty-gritty details are at
>
> http://www.lojban.org/files/etymology/finprims
>
> This puzzles me. The Spanish glosses are sometimes really weird. eg,
> pont - puente
> kord - cuerda
> port - puerta
>
> This 'ue' does represent an original /O/, but it contrasts with /o/. It is
> also not pronounced o anywhere, except maybe portugal - and that is
> generally not thought of as the same language. What happened?
Some words have a regular alternation between "ue" and "o" depending on
stress: oler:huele; contar:cuente. Perhaps the "o"-form is the stem of a
longer derived word.
It was because "ue" in Spanish is almost always etymologically a sound
change from Latin "o", so that we are picking up a root supposedly
recognizable in all Romance languages, and often English as well. This was
partly to strengthen the influence of Spanish
Consider door English "dor", Spanish "puert-". Spanish being less
weighted than English and Chinese (and Hindi) it probably would have gotten
no contribution into the resulting word. Using "port-", it reinforces the
English, making sure the "or" is there, and provided the opportunity to get
the p or the t in the word (which it ultimately did not).
We had a whole set of tables on how optimally to convert each language to
Lojban phonemes systematically. I think the Spanish rules were close to
what were devised by Chuck Barton (who was a polyglot linguist for the Navy
including Spanish) for JCB back in the 1970s.
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