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[lojban] Re: la tam, la meris



On Sun, 14 Sep 2003, xah wrote:

> why is Tom translated to "la tam." not "la tom.", and Mary to "la
> meris." not "la meri."?

The former because the Am. E. long 'o' lies auditively closer to the
Lojban 'a' than the Lojban 'o'. A British Tom, on the other hand, would be
"la tom." in Lojban.

The latter because the word formation rules of Lojban dictates that all
words belonging to the name-class ends with a consonant, and 's' has
arisen as a convention in cases where there are no final consonants in the
original language.

"la meri" breaks up as "la me ri", and is actually a valid name, albeit a
rather strange one. It translates as something like "One Of Them".

-- 
Arnt Richard Johansen                                http://arj.nvg.org/
Information wants to be antropomorhized!