From lojbab@lojban.org Thu Apr 13 12:47:53 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 13593 invoked from network); 13 Apr 2000 19:47:53 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by m1.onelist.org with QMQP; 13 Apr 2000 19:47:53 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO stmpy.cais.net) (205.252.14.63) by mta2 with SMTP; 13 Apr 2000 19:47:53 -0000 Received: from bob ([209.8.89.177]) by stmpy.cais.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA12658 for ; Thu, 13 Apr 2000 15:46:38 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <4.2.2.20000413154632.00ab4940@127.0.0.1> X-Sender: vir1036/pop.cais.com@127.0.0.1 X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.2.2 Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 15:51:34 -0400 To: The Lojban List Subject: Re: [lojban] RECORD:translating names In-Reply-To: <38F5B6E7.3D45@math.bas.bg> References: <200004122035.QAA20593@locke.ccil.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed X-eGroups-From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" At 03:00 PM 04/13/2000 +0300, Ivan A Derzhanski wrote: >Why is that? Well, /f/ is a recent acquisition in Slavic; /v/ >started life as a glide (it does after all go back to PIE _w_), >and while it didn't have a voiced counterpart, it was in all >respects an entity of the same category as /l/ and /r/. When >/f/ became a phoneme in its own right, /v/ became phonetically >a paired voiced fricative, but phonologically it kept its old >sonorant status. > >The best lojbanisation is probably {u}: {moskuA}. That was exactly what I was going to say after reading the last paragraph! >Note that only one of the six Lojban source languages, English, >has /f/:/v/ as a full-fledged pair of fricatives. Of the rest, > >* only Chinese, Arabic and Spanish have /f/ as a common sound; > in Russian and Hindi it is almost restricted to loanwords > (and many Hindi speakers pronounce [p{h}] in its stead); > >* only Russian has /v/, and even there it is not a genuine > voiced fricative. The closest thing is /B/ in Spanish, > /w/ in the rest. > >(Granted that in this particular respect Spanish is not typical >of the Romance branch.) Note that the inclusion of f/v pair was a) traditional to Loglan, but more importantly was in that first weekend of Lojban design an explicit decision to maximize voiced/unvoiced pairings in a symmetric way (i.e. blame it on Gary Burgess and Tommy Whitlock %^). We came very close to including the voiced velar in parallel to x as a result, but I think decided against it more as a matter of how hard it would be to teach it, given that x was itself going to be hard to teach. lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@lojban.org 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 (newly updated!)