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

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 06:24:36 -0400

At 09:16 AM 05/28/2000 +0000, Alfred W. Tüting wrote:
>--- In [email-masked], "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@l...>
>wrote:
> > If we had it to do over again, we would map "ong" to "on(g?)" and not to
> > "yn".
>
>IMHO this mapping to lb: "yn" most probably is based on a
>misunderstanding, maybe going back to pronunciation standards in
>southern Chinese dialects like Cantonese: Mandarin (pinyin) -eng (lb:
>-yn(g)) very often is pron. -ong (=ung) or -un in
>southern dialects (e.g. BIG5 Â× pinyin: feng1, "fruitful/abundant"
>in dialect is *written* and pronounced "fung" - pron. in
>'virtual' pinyin about: fong -, or BIG5 · pinyin: feng1, "wind"
>etc. in dialect written and pron. "fun" as in Cantonese taifun, BIG5
>¤j·, pinyin: dafeng!)
>Pinyin "-ong" should be transcribed to lb: "un(g)" *not* -yn (e.g.
>mau.dzydun.)

I now have the source in front of me:
_The Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary_
Editor in Chief Professor Wu Jingrong, Beijing Foreign Languages Institute
Published by Commercial Press (Hong Kong and Beijing) and John Wiley and Sons
ISBN 0-471-86796-9

You are correct and I recalled incorrectly - ong is listed as [un(g)]

The short form of what I can eventually put up is that /e/ generally mapped 
to schwa which by the pattern of other languages we mapped to Lojban a - we 
should have instead mapped it back to Lojban e for Chinese. /a/ mapped to 
Lojban a; /i/ mapped to Lojban i (but should have mapped differently after 
z/c/s/zh/ch/sh/r) /io/ and /u:/ mapped as Lojban u. I have several special 
cases including /iu/ and /iou/ mapping to Lojban iyu, /iong/ to 
Lojban un(g) /uo/ to Lojban uy (which may be why I remember the schwa for 
"o").

The other problem, one specific to the gismu making process, is the mapping 
of both /n(g)/ and /n/ to Lojban /n/ in addition to the mapping of all the 
fricatives and affricate consonants to the only 4 Lojban 
counterparts. Thus, if I recall correctly, j and zh both mapped to Lojban 
j, because d alone is useless as a clue, as did r
q and ch both mapped to Lojban c, because t alone is useless as a clue
z mapped to z
c mapped to s
sh mapped to c

If this seems completely illogical (or backwards or something) you are 
probably right, since I am reconstructing this on sight of the IPA chart 
after being up all night. The actual table is packed away rather deeply at 
the moment and likely will not be dug out before LogFest in August.

> > 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.
>
>In Mandarin there can be no g-ending except in -ng, so this would not
>necessarily lead to much misunderstanding to a Chinese
>speaker familiar with lojbanization.

That is true, but in gismu the g is always medial, and it could have crept 
in from one of the other 5 languages - the point is that we had it on 
authority from both a linguist and a Chinese native speaker that they would 
not see any sound relation between g and (ng), and the point of the gismu 
making algorithm was to provide sound patterns that could serve as 
hints. We used the rules we inherited from JCB, the inventor of the 
language, and those rules by and large treated all languages equally. This 
was not wise for Chinese for one reason (the bad sound mappings) and Arabic 
for a different reason (in Arabic, the vowels have little sound/meaning 
significance, while the consonants and their order are vital). Russian 
suffered from its tendency towards long words, even after we dropped 
declension endings. As a result, Hindi, English, and Spanish are somewhat 
more effectively represented (unfortunately our Hindi scholarship was 
probably the weakest of our 6 languages though).

> BTW, in southern dialects, there
>are lots of consonant endings, e.g. in Hakka language BIG5 «È
>®a (=Hakka or "guest families"), pinyin: ke4 jia1, it is "hag-ga".

I had a Cantonese dictionary, but we decided to stick firmly to Mandarin as 
Pinyinized, since that was nominally official.

>One principle question:
>For what reason cmene have to follow the strict rules of Lojban
>phonology??

If they do not, then presumably they will be heard by an ideal Lojban 
speaker differently than they are spoken. In other words, since we do not 
allow mixing of voiced and unvoiced consonants in clusters other than lmnr, 
a cluster like tj would be heard either as tc or dj, probably depending on 
the norms of the speaker's native language.

>If it just were for computers to understand the
>language, isn't it sufficient to enclose cmene (first of all personal
>names etc.) in the structure beginning with the cmene indicators
>"la" and the "."?

No. Because what comes within the rules must fit Lojban rules or it might 
not recognize the delimitors. For example, the Arabic gutturals might be 
taken by a computer as a glottal stop, which in turn would be a pause. We 
have a means for quoting non Lojban for a name, using dual identical 
full-word delimiters with pauses before and after each delimiter, so that 
you would be la'o .doc. Alfred W. Tüting .doc. where it is mere convention 
to use something like the language rafsi as the delimiter in order to 
suggest the basis for pronunciation. This convention was originally 
devised for scientific nomenclature such as Linnean binomials, where it 
simply is unacceptable to Lojbanize the name (and even Chinese does not do 
so, I have been told).

When you use "la" however, you are promising that the name has already been 
sufficiently Lojbanized that such precautions are unnecessary.

> Shouldn't it be the main goal to giving the reader
>an idea of what the name word is pointing to and what's its
>common/real pronunciation? So, e.g. writing la maozedong. (instead of
>la mau.dzydun.) would function a lot better in this sense.

The tradition in linguistics is that the spoken language takes precedence 
over the written, and we followed that tradition in setting down our 
prescription. Presumably someone pronouncing the Lojban as written will 
come closest to the pronunciation that would be recognized by a native 
speaker. The ultimate authority as to the correct form of a name is of 
course the person who names (the parent or in some cultures the person 
himself upon becoming an adult); Unfortunately, we have no way of asking 
Mao how he would prefer his name written in Lojban %^).

>Or,
>writing the the cluster "ng" in (e.g. Chinese or German) names could
>imply that it's not pronounced like in British/American
>English as two separated consonants (Engl.: fin-ger, Germ.: Finger),
>so the reader is not obliged to pronounce it the lb way.

If it is "la" you pronounce it the Lojban way. If it is "la'o" anything 
goes. If it is "la" you are, absent explicit context, without information 
as to the kind of name it is and the pronunciation rules that apply. The 
only rules we know about in Lojban are Lojban rules, and you cannot count 
on a random Lojban reader knowing any other ones.

>In Glosa language, all 'foreign' words (like 'french', 'english'
>etc.) had been 'incorporated' (i.e. left untouched). I wouldn't go
>that far, though.

With la'o, you have that option.

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