From grey.havens@earthling.net Tue Aug 22 12:19:56 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 21547 invoked from network); 22 Aug 2000 19:19:55 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 22 Aug 2000 19:19:55 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO postfix2.free.fr) (212.27.32.74) by mta2 with SMTP; 22 Aug 2000 19:19:55 -0000 Received: from burp.n (paris11-nas3-45-197.dial.proxad.net [212.27.45.197]) by postfix2.free.fr (Postfix) with ESMTP id 194FC74018 for ; Tue, 22 Aug 2000 21:19:53 +0200 (MEST) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 21:02:38 +0200 (CET) X-Sender: elrond@burp.n To: Lojban List Subject: tcadu cmene Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: Elrond Hi, The Thai culture has its own language and writing implement, with a quite not negligible set of sounds and phonemes that seem allophonic for westerners but are not for Thai people. Therefore, while some cities like Bangkok have a thai name quite easily transcriptible into lojban ([xruntep] is the thai name, meaning "city of angels", for Bangkok), several are quite problematic; in particular, several different cities/places have similar names that are completely allophonic in lojban. for example: Bang Na Phang Nga Pang Ga (the Nga being I.P.A. [Na], with N being a velar nasal) The problem here is that both "Nga" is as much as close to "n" as it is to "g", and "Ph" is very much like "B". What should be the appropriate transcriptions ? More generally, in the case of such similarities, what is the regular workline to follow in order to build the most accurate transcriptions ? regards, raph