Re: [lojban] Question about Lojbanized Name in Unix/Linux

[Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org>]

On Saturday, September 20, 2014 18:05:40 Alexander Kozhevnikov wrote:
> coi
> 
> Is there an accepted alternative to the comma "," in lojban (like "h" is
> an accepted alternative to the apostrophe "'")?
> 
> Background: I've been intending to get into lojban for years, and
> recently when switching from Windows to Linux, I decided I'd put the
> lojbanized version of my name in for my user's "full name". I write my
> name in lojban like so:
> 
> .a,lekSANdr.koJEVni,kov.
> (I based it on my name's Russian pronunciation, not the American-English
> one.)

What's your dialect of Russian? The standard one collapses о and а in 
unstressed syllables and devoices final consonants like в->ф. But I suppose 
that Russians, at least literate ones, think of them as о even if pronounced 
as а (la'a lo labru'o cu toltugni).

> So here's the problem: In Unix/Linux, the user info is stored in the
> passwd file, and the full name in particular is stored in the "GECOS"
> field, which uses commas as a separator for its subfields, and (stupidly)
> has no escaping mechanism for the commas.
> 
> So if I use the above name, the system ends up showing my name as just
> ".a". My current workaround is to use semicolons, which as I understand it
> have no assigned meaning in lojban and should thus be possible to coopt
> without conflicts.
> 
> Thoughts?

Commas are ignored when determining whether two words are the same and where 
the default stress is (valfendi gets it wrong on "spatrxapi,o", but that's 
what I thought it was when I wrote it). You can leave them out.

> P.S. On the subject of my lojbanized name, I am also still hazy on when to
> or not to put starting/terminating periods and when to precede with a
> 'la', so my apologies for any omissions or redundancies on that front.

In cmene with more than one cmevla, I normally put periods with no spaces 
between the components; e.g. "misisipis.rirx". I recently translated a very 
long name, which came out as ".kic. bes.aviel. bes.tsyror. bes.bykorat. 
bes.afiax." The pause before "aleksandr" is required regardless of dotside, 
because it begins with a vowel.

Pierre
-- 
The Black Garden on the Mountain is not on the Black Mountain.

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