From pycyn@aol.com Sat May 27 15:11:23 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 25634 invoked from network); 27 May 2000 22:11:23 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m1.onelist.org with QMQP; 27 May 2000 22:11:23 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-r20.mx.aol.com) (152.163.225.162) by mta1 with SMTP; 27 May 2000 22:11:23 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-r20.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v27.9.) id a.e0.4ec40d9 (3958) for ; Sat, 27 May 2000 18:11:16 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 18:11:16 EDT Subject: Chinese names To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 3.0 16-bit for Windows sub 41 From: pycyn@aol.com I suppose this question has to have been settled in the process of using Chinese words to contribute to Lojban gismu, but I do not remember what the rules are. The problem is that English (and Lojban, more or less) has sounds that are simultaneously voiced, weak, and unaspirated, contrasting with another set of voiceless, strong, and aspirated. In Chinese, the voiced voiceless contrast drops out (as in French, the aspirated/un- does, pretty much), though much of the patterning is otherwise the same. So the temptation -- and the more recent English -- at least -- scholarly usage has been to use English voiced for Chinese unaspirated with some minor exceptions . The older style system --even with all its diacritics(which no one ever uses all of) -- is just obscureon some issues. For example of relevance, is the "Ch" of "Chuangtzu" the affricate lb/dj/ or the fricative /j/? The new system seems to say the latter (and that "ts" is just /z/), but the latter is generally said to be wrong and so the former may be also. And many of thes issues get changed before "i", which is much li ke lb/y/but is very different after these fric/affric sounds (and so they are often spelled differently then). Something surely can be worked out within lb phonology.