Subject: Re: [lojban] Allah

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 03 Jun 2001 02:01:50 -0400

At 06:24 PM 06/02/2001 -0400, Pierre Abbat wrote:
>On Sat, 02 Jun 2001, Robin Turner wrote:
> >I'm not sure that {la musycei} would be an appropriate name, since Muslims
> >are adamant that the god they worship is not specific to Muslims, but is 
> also
> >the god of Jews, Christians or indeed any monotheist (more liberal Muslims
> >count Hindus in here as well, since technically all the Hindu gods are
> >aspects of bhagvan, and way-out Muslims count Taoists in as well). I'd go
> >for {la .alax.} as the simplest cmene. If you want to translate 
> "Allah", it
> >just comes out as {le cevni}. If you want to specifically exclude all the
> >other possible candidates, I suppose you could use {le jegycei}, though 
> it's
> >a pretty ugly word.
>
>The problem with "la .alax." is that it's not a valid Lojban cmene - it breaks
>into "la .a la x". That's why we have these variants alex, alyx, ala'ax,
>ala'um, ala'un.

Another way to form a variant, recognizing that the Arabic has a double 
letter "ll" would be to add a consonant before the "l" that does not 
de-emphasize the "l". la "axlax, works best for me, but who knows how it 
would sound to an Arabic speaker.

On the other hand, my recollection from some earlier discussion is that 
Moslems would prefer a description like le musycei to a mangling of the 
Arabic name.

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