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Re: [lojban] Re: Question about Lojbanized Name in Unix/Linux
ki'e (that means thanks if I'm not forgetting/mistaking things) for the
very informative replies to .xorxes. .uuZIT. Pierre and Gleki.
My replies to all of you follow, organized loosely by topic (so
quotes are out-of-order from your own messages):
On Sun, 21 Sep 2014, Jorge Llambías wrote:
The language doesn't actually officially prescribe where syllable
boundaries are (although it does have some rules about what counts as a
syllable, because syllable count is significant in some cases. The commas
are always optional, and they indicate the writer's preferred syllabie
separations.
[snip]
They are not different words in Lojban, just (very slightly) different
permitted pronunciations of the same word. Even the stress in cmevla
doesn't change the word, so "aleksándr" and "aléksandr" and "áleksandr" are
all valid pronounciations of the same word. Stress is only important in
brivla.
[and]
On Tue, 23 Sep 2014, Pierre Abbat wrote:
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.
Alright, that's good to know. I guess ".aleksandr.kojevnikov." is plenty
good for my purposes then, since apparently it's considered acceptably
identical regardless of where the stress or syllable breaks go.
More and more these discussions reveal to me that my understanding of what
a "stress" on a syllable means is flawed/limited - it was based on what my
parents/school taught me with regard to Russian (in America on the other
hand I've virtually never had syllable stress/emphasis come up in
discussion of how to pronounce things: closest thing that comes to mind
is a quote from some sitcom where one character says "you're putting
the emphAsis on the wrong syllAble", and to clarify, besides
stress/emphasis, they also made those 'A's like lojban's 'a' sound, not
like their typical pronunciation, which in my mind is more like a lojban
'y' typically.)
So to give some context: My understanding, and I very very tentatively
want to say most Russians' understanding, is that there is no real
distinction between emphasis and stress on a syllable (I think this is
still correct?), but also that there is and can ever be only one syllable
per word that is stressed (this latter part I was taught early enough that
somehow, despite it not being logically sound now that I think about it,
I can't for the life of me recall rejecting it ever since). Because of
this, I have ONLY my Russian childhood based understanding of syllable
stress to guide me.
Okay, so worse still, as you bring up, in Russian the 'a' and 'o' vowels
are collapsed (is that a/the technical term for this?) into what sounds
like the lojban 'y' when not stressed. So my understanding of what it even
means to stress a syllable was at least partly conflated with actually
changing the phoneme until recently as well.
I just realized this is more or at least as relevant to the
effect-of-learning-lojban-if-your-native-tongue-is-something-else thread.
On Sun, 21 Sep 2014, Jorge Llambías wrote:
BTW, a.lek,san,dr and ko,jev,ni,kov are the default syllables with the
camxes morphology, so in your case you are not even showing a non-standard
syllable break.
[and]
On Sun, 21 Sep 2014, 'Wuzzy' via lojban wrote:
Another workaround would be to simply drop the commas altogether, but
then you would have to live with a slightly different syllabation.
Can you two help me resolve/reconsile these two statements? Seems like
.xorxes. is saying the default syllabation is equivalent to mine, but
.uuZIT. is saying dropping the commas would make it slightly different.
I'm guessing the answer lies in me understanding the meaning of "camxes
morphology" and if that means it's different vs. some alternative
morphology or something?
Did you mean for that to be written "a.lek,san,dr", or am I correctly
guessing that that was a typo and you meant "a,lek,san,dr"?
On Sun, 21 Sep 2014, Jorge Llambías wrote:
The glottal stop/pause around cmevla (not around names in general, just
around cmevla) is always required. The peiod to represent it in writing is
optional, since as long as you write spaces around the name it can always
be inferred.
I see. I had not realized (or maybe just forgot) that leaving the period
off was optional. I had gotten into the habit of thinking of the spaces as
optional and the periods as not, since that to me maps more cleanly to the
actual sound stream, but that makes sense: in writing either one is
acceptable there. Thank you for clarifying.
Sidenote: now that you mention this though, and I've had time to
understand it and think about it, I would like to tentatively voice my
opinion in favor of always putting the periods in. Such implicit rules are
easy for machines to account for on the fly, but if I envision a society
with Lojban as the primary language, I can easily see it quickly devolving
into people forgetting the glotal stops when reading text and learning the
language being slower/harder (and more likely to result in someone
learning something wrong) if text is typically written with glotal stops
not signalled by periods in places where they are mandatory.
On Sun, 21 Sep 2014, Jorge Llambías wrote:
mu'o mi'e xorxes
Another question: Isn't the whole point of "mu'o" to indicate that the
statement/message is over, therefore doesn't having words after it go
against its intended purpose, strictly speaking? In a written medium like
this it obviously doesn't matter (at least assuming I 'understand' email
and also have some notion of the typical stuff email replies and mailing
lists end up leaving in the email body), but if we were talking in real
time I would hope that I could treat "mu'o" as a cue that I could start
talking and not overlap your statements. Thoughts?
On Sun, 21 Sep 2014, 'Wuzzy' via lojban wrote:
.a,lekSANdr.koJEVni,kov.
“.a,lekSANdr.” can be also written as “.a,leksandr.”. By default, the
stress is on the syllable before the last one, in this case, “san”. If
your word uses the default pronounciation, you do not have to
capitalize it. Having the stress on that syllable is also preferred.
*Nod* I was aware about that second-from-last rule. It makes more sense
why I chose to capitalize it anyway in context of my initial
goals+ignorance: I knew that by making the stress explicit I would
unambiguously represent the syllable breaks, and since I wasn't sure what
if any default syllable breaks there were at the time, my choices were
either ".a,lek,san,dr.' or '.a,lekSANdr.', and of the two I liked the
latter because it provided more information explicitly which is already a
plus, and in less space (I mean in ASCII and UTF8 encodings, which are the
only encodings I respect enough to consider, though I guess in most
fonts/handwritings too).
Given the replies by .xorxes. though, I am leaning more towards just
".aleksandr.kojevnikov." and moving on with it (I am unsure yet how I feel
about this business of lojban effectively considering cmevla as identical
regardless of stress or syllable break, in particular as to whether or not
this makes me want to just omit syllable break/stress cues from my
lojbanized name entirely, or if I want to stick with making them
explicit.) Could you elaborate on this:
On Sun, 21 Sep 2014, 'Wuzzy' via lojban wrote:
Lojbanization of names does not have to be perfect, also, it is
preferred to Lojbanize names with default pronounciation.
Why is default pronounciation preferred?
On Sun, 21 Sep 2014, 'Wuzzy' via lojban wrote:
This just sucks.
It seems the GECOS field is culturally biased and it looks a lot of
this is only there to carry along legacy stuff.
Many manpages talk about a “full name”—This implies that everyone has a
so-called “full name”, whatever that means.
My thoughts exactly. I think as a vague notion "full name" isn't too bad,
when you consider that this is in contrast to a username, so unless your
username IS your name (in whatever form you'd consider full/real), it's
probably somewhat meaningful (just poorly named). I'm not sure the rest of
those subfields are even used all that much ever since computers became
personal and not mainframes.
I'm almost tempted to start advocating in the Linux/Unix community at
large for an extension to GECOS which would allow for, at the bare
minimum, escape sequences. Maybe using some magic byte as the first
character in the GECOS field to signal that it's following the new
extension format (for backwords compatibility since we all, I presume,
know how much computer-related stuff worships backwards compatibility).
Rinse and repeat for the passwd-style files if they don't support escaping
colons (since that's what separates the fields in those files). But sadly
I don't know when I'd find the time to make that happen.
On Sun, 21 Sep 2014, 'Wuzzy' via lojban wrote:
I know this is stupid but that way you have at least no alien
characters.
I do not know any estabilshed alternative characters for the comma.
Lojban has a very small alphabet and the semicolon is indeed not used.
Well, for my usecase I can now sleep soundly at night without the commas,
and thus without the semicolons, on my Debian Linux install. Still, it
would be nice if we had an accepted alternative to commas for those corner
cases where a comma or comma-like characters are unavailable (e.g.
whatever unicode provides that might look like a comma... The single
bottom opening quote thing for instance ( ‚ <-- might get screwed up
somewhere along the line from me entering it and you all reading it, or
show up indistinguishable from a comma in some (many?) fonts). More
usecases should provide sufficient support for such characters, but if
you're stuck with ANSII compatability only...)
On Tue, 23 Sep 2014, Pierre Abbat wrote:
On Saturday, September 20, 2014 18:05:40 Alexander Kozhevnikov wrote:
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).
Yes, I think some or even most of us don't actually realize either of
these phoneme transformations happen. We also effectively claim "жи" is
really pronounced "жы", ditto for "ши"->"шы" (sidenote, this is so
ingrained I had to retrain myself for the lojban "ji" and "ci"
combinations to pronounce them with an actual "i" sound), but those are
really heavily asserted in early teaching, so I ended up picking it up
consciously. I only noticed the в->ф thing when I was already in America
and working to maintain/further my Russian: I kept writing things ending
with ф because that's what they sounded like, then getting corrected that
it's actually в. I wonder if Russians who spent more time immersed in just
Russian end up not noting the latter, or perhaps even not noticing the
former. But to answer your question, I know a phonetically-faithful
reproduction is "kojevnikyv", but see Gleki's reply to your statement and
my additional reply after it:
On Tue, 23 Sep 2014, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
And although this might sound strange it preserves the visual form of the
name.
Yes, this was a conscious choice. In fact, I didn't even consciously
realize we did this (transform/collapse 'a' and 'o' to 'y' (still using
lojban characters and their corresponding phonemes... I should map the IPA
symbols to my keyboard sometime) when they're not stressed), until my
partner had this told to her by her Russian teacher. Ever since I became
cognizant of it, I've been annoyed by it, and so I thought about it and
decided that my name was given to me with an 'o' in the last syllable, and
by god it will sound like an 'o', Russian proper pronunciation be damned.
Of course, it's a bit arbitrary, arguably it was given to me in it's
pronounced form, plus given names are inately arbitrary and a
self-determined one is more 'true' in my book anyway, but granting for a
second that I give my given name the privilege of being treated as my real
name, the idea is that I think most Russians consciously perceive/think it
as written, not as it is pronounced, which grants the written version more
legitimacy.
.ui ki'e Thank you all again,
mi'e .aleksandr.kojevnikov. mu'o
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