Subject: Re: [lojban] coi rodo -- greetings from the newbie

From: "Daniel Gudlat" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 May 2000 09:56:32 +0200

la pol. cusku di'e

> Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) writes:
> > At 12:17 PM 05/03/2000 -0400, Paul Jarc wrote:
> > >The lojban spelling would be {DJEF OLsyn}.
> >
> > This is a good answer, but two points:
> >
> > 1) Lojban syllables with "y" are never stressed, the default stress
is
> > penultimate (next to last syllable),
>
> More precisely, IIRC, it's the next-to-last non-y syllable (i.e., the
> non-y syllable most immediately prior to the last non-y syllable, as
> opposed to the non-y syllable most immediately prior to the last
> syllable). {olsyn} has no such syllable, of course, so I guess stress
> would go on `ol' after all.

Sounds right to me.

> > So while Pol has given an acceptable Lojban version,
>
> I think I prefer `Paul' in English, or {la pol} in lojban. `Pol' is a
> bit... odd-seeming. Speaking of name-lojbanization, can anyone think
> of a better way to lojbanize that vowel?

I agree with the Paul vs. Pol issue.
I think that open o in Paul is essentially un-lojbanizable, seeing as
lojban only has "pure" sounds. If you're texan, you might want to
lojbanize your name to "porl", but that's just me and my odd linguistic
humor, I guess... ;-)

> > 2) Most dialects of English do not actually use a "y" in the
pronunciation
> > where Pol inserted one, but just use syllabic "n".
>
> Listening to myself, I hear a little bit of a vowel between the s and
> n - not quite lojban's {y}, more like English's short i (I ought to
> learn the phonetic alphabet one of these days...), but lojban doesn't
> have an unambiguous way to write that sound. But {olsn} certainly
> works too.

Lojban not only doesn't have an unambigous way to write that sound, it
very specifically doesn't have that sound at all. IIRC the short i in
english "bit" is used as a discardable, "out-of-band" buffer vowel to
break up consonant clusters that are hard to pronounce for a lojban
speaker. So, depending on how pronounced a sound you have between the s
and n in Olson, the only alternatives I see are olsn and olsyn.

Bye,
--
Daniel "Gudy" Gudlat
[email-masked]

No one pays me enough to speak for them, so I only speak for myself.