Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: coi rodo - mi'e .aulun.

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 03:14:02 -0400

At 10:41 PM 05/27/2000 +0000, Alfred W. Tüting wrote:
>Jorge,
>thanks for the infos. O.K., it's quite clear now how the Chinese
>transcription can be done:
>
>Unaspirated/aspirated consonant pairs should be written about as in
>pinyin:
>djuan/tcuan (pinyin: zhuan/chuan)
>djin/tcin (pinyin: jin/qin)
>dz./ts. (pinyin: zi/ci)
>dzy/tsy ( (pinyin: ze/ce)
>and (no pairs existing):
>cy (pinyin: she)
>c. (pinyin: shi W.-G.: shih)
>sy (pinyin: se)
>s. (pinyin: si)
>
>y, y-, -y,-y- ( (pinyin: -e etc.):
>as in y, yn, ly, uyn, fyn. (pinyin: e, en, le = ¼Ö, wen, feng)

When we made the Lojban gismu, we had as a tool a publication of the 
Chinese government giving their preferred IPA equivalents for the pinyin 
characters, which we mapped to their nearest Lojban equivalent. There is a 
complete such chart.

I could post this (and/or put it on the website). Unfortunately, this 
official mapping led to severe collision because so many pinyin letters 
mapped to schwa; we also did not at the time understand how C+i sounded 
(e.g. pinyin "zi"), though I have since had this clarified.

If we had it to do over again, we would map "ong" to "on(g?)" and not to 
"yn". The g is questionable because Lojban maps the /ng/ consonant to 
/n/. As someone noted, if the g is present it is pronounced separately 
from the n. But the real problem is that in gismu making we could have 
ended up with the g and not the n in the Lojban word, and the g by itself 
without the n is probably useless to a Chinese speaker for recognition.

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