Subject: Onomatopoeia?

From: Rob Speer <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 20:51:09 -0400

I'm wondering - how do you use onomatopoeia in Lojban?

All I can think of is that you'd have to use entire Lojban words to approximate
the sounds, whereas in other languages you can use the sounds of that language
to approximate a sound.

le bakni cu cusku zo mu
(The cow says "Five")

But if the sound doesn't sound like a Lojban word or if it needs to be used as
a different part of speech than a quote, it seems that it wouldn't work. Here
are some things that I don't think could be expressed the same way in Lojban -
correct me if I'm wrong:

The fireworks went off with a bang.
He slammed the door.
The bow twanged when the archer shot the arrow.
The angry dog said 'Grrr'.

The last one is interesting because everything works except actually quoting
'Grrr'. In Lojban, you can quote grammatical Lojban text (lu...li'u), you can
quote Lojban words (lo'u...le'u), and you can quote text from another language
and its corresponding sound (zoi). So it seems that zoi is the only one that
allows you to quote most sounds, even if the sound could be expressed in Lojban
letters.

But what language are miscellaneous sounds? It seems that you'd have to express
the onomatopoeia in some other language and wrap that up in zoi to say it in
Lojban.

--
Rob Speer