[lojban] Re: How to say "Hmong"?

[sen <sen@lojbo.org>]

Pierre Abbat wrote:
> The Hmong language has two dialects in America (I don't know about dialects in 
> Asia), Hmoob Dawb (White Hmong) and Moob Leeg (Green Mong). The name could be 
> Lojbanized as "xmon", but that might be disliked by the Moob Leeg, who don't 
> have the "hm" sound. It could be "mon", but there's another language called 
> Mon, in the Mon-Khmer family. So what is the Lojban word for Hmong?
>
> Pierre
>
>
>   
Pierre, I'm sure you agree that we should make a point of look at the actual pronunciation of a foreign name by the locals, rather than its conventional English spelling or pronunciation. In the case of "Hmong", these seem to be reasonably close. Wikipedia give the Hmong word for Hmong as [mɔ̃ŋ], with the [m] either voiced or devoiced according to dialect, just as you indicate. However, I would tend to make voiceless [m] into "m" in Lojban, anyway, so I don't think there's a conflict as far as fu'ivla are concerned. "Mon", on the other hand, appears to be [mun] in Burmese or, more importantly, [man] in Mon. So, assuming that there are no other conflicts, I would make "Hmong" = {mon} and "Mon" = {man}.

I suppose there will always tend to be a lot of conflicts, though, when it comes to these short cultural words, since there are so many of them. We might be inclined to add an additional morpheme from the source language as filler. For instance, the name of the main Chinese ethnic group, the 汉 Hàn, could become {xan} in Lojban, but it might had better be {xanjen} from 汉人 Hànrén (Han people) or {xanzus} from 汉族 Hànzú (Han ethnicity).

-Nat



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