Subject: Re: [lojban] gismu etymology

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2003 19:31:56 -0500

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 [email-masked]
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