From Ti@fa-kuan.muc.de Sun May 28 09:13:43 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 15570 invoked from network); 28 May 2000 16:13:43 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m1.onelist.org with QMQP; 28 May 2000 16:13:43 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO qg.egroups.com) (10.1.2.27) by mta1 with SMTP; 28 May 2000 16:13:43 -0000 Received: (qmail 31096 invoked from network); 28 May 2000 16:13:42 -0000 Received: from n7.onelist.org (HELO fj.egroups.com) (10.1.10.46) by iqg.egroups.com with SMTP; 28 May 2000 16:13:42 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: Ti@fa-kuan.muc.de Received: from [10.1.10.100] by fj.egroups.com with NNFMP; 28 May 2000 16:13:41 -0000 Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 16:13:36 -0000 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: coi rodo - mi'e .aulun. Message-ID: <8grgjg+7dt1@eGroups.com> In-Reply-To: <4.2.2.20000528052518.00b19c00@127.0.0.1> User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Length: 2688 X-Mailer: eGroups Message Poster From: "=?iso-8859-1?q?Alfred_W._T=FCting?=" > 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. Mapping it to schwa wouldn't have been too bad an idea: pinyin "le" (W.-G. "lo") is somewhat between lb "luy" and "ly" - the latter perhaps being bit closer (e.g. emperor "Yung-lo" py: "yong3 le4" =A5=C3=BC=D6 i.e. "eternal joy") pinyin "luo" (W.-G. "lo") is between lb "luo" and "lo" - closer to the first, about like English: "lwo (e.g. Luoma =C3=B9=B0=A8 "Rome") pinyin "he" (W.-G. "ho") is a bit different, about lb "xy" (e.g. py "he2" =AAe "river(s)" - north of the Huai). For building gismu, there are far too many schwa in Chinese words. > I have several special cases including /iu/ and /iou/ mapping to Lojban iyu, /iong/ to > Lojban un(g) lb "iyu" is not bad for py "iu" because words like "liu" (e.g. py: "liu4" =A4=BB "six") are a bit like "liou/leou". pinyin "-ui" (e.g. kui, gui, sui etc.) would go well by lb "-uyi" because a bit like "-uei" (hence W.-G.: kuei =B6Q "precious/ honourable). py "-iong/yong" should be lb "iun." pinyin "shun" (English pron. rather "shwun" or even "shwuen) maybe could be written in lb by "cuyn". This is all pretty complicated/sophisticated thinking of French "le" or German/Hungarian/Turkish umlauts (should transcribe my second name with "umlaut" u or i??? Easter European speakers tend to say "i" (except the Russians pronouncing, and even writing "iu" instead (e.g. their German-Russian word "bjustgalter", German: "B=9Fstenhalter" engl. "bra(ssiere)") > 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). Also, Chinese (Mandarin) phonologically is pretty poor to get good material from (Hungarian would have been fine with lots of short and distinct vocabulary - although a 'small' language - it is really great! :( Also in a lojban sense. I should have to stick to learning some more Lojban now, instead of always hanging around writing long postings ;)) Thanks for your instructions c'o mi'e .aulun.