Subject: Re: [lojban] Transliterations survey

From: Arnt Richard Johansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2001 19:10:58 +0200 (MEST)

The ASCII IPA mapping scheme I use in this message is SAMPA.

> Please evaluate as voluminously as you can the following candidate
> transliterations. Please only comment on an instance if you know the
exact
> pronunciation of the original. Feel free to try these on
> mundanes^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hnon-Lojbanists. Ignore the fact that some of these
> are not legal cmene. Anecdotes about transliterations of these
placenames
> in your native languages are also welcome.

In many of the examples below, one of the candidate transliterations
have a diphthong where the original has a diphthong. I feel very
strongly against this. I'm not sure whether it's because it complicates
matters unnecessarily, or because of the Norwegian cultural bias that
says that monophthongs are the only true vowels, and diphthongs are
merely combinations of monophthongs.

> Muenchen (= Munich), Germany

> munxen.
> miunxen.
> minxen.

To me, all of them are unacceptable. The palatal fricative in "München"
sounds closer to "c" than to "x". It is more difficult to decide whether
we want to retract the close-central vowel ("ü") to Lojban /u/, or advance
it to /i/. I'd say we go for "u", as it parallels the orthographic
appearance of the original name. Thus: "muncen.".

> Koeln (= Cologne), Germany

> koln.
> kioln.
> keln.

When a non-linguistically-trained Norwegian hears the schwa in a
stressed position, it sounds as the Norwegian /ø/ (slashed o), which is
almost exactly the same as the German /ö/. I don't know how acceptable
"kyln." sounds to Germans, but if that doesn't do it, we end up with a
draw between two Lojban phonemes, /e/ and /o/, which are both equally
wrong. "koln." may have a slight edge here, as well, since it looks
more like the original.

> Fukushima, Japan

> fukucima.
> fikicima.
> fykycima.

Most probably "fukucimas.". I don't actually know Japanese, but the
thing with the Japanese 'u', as I remember it from my undergraduate
course in phonetics and _The handbook of the IPA_, is that it is not
quite central, but somewhere between central and back. The
unroundedness of the Japanese 'u' is also not big enough, I believe, to
warrant throwing it all the way forward to /i/.

> Bourgogne (= Burgundy), France

> burGON.
> burGONiy.
> burGOIN.

"burGON." If we can get by with only /n/ for all nasals from dental to
velar, why should a simple secondary articulation such as palatalization
deter us from expressing it as /n/?

> Marseilles, France
> marSEL.
> marSELiy.
> marSEIL.
> marSEI.

In Norway, we say the latter one. (Actually, we say [mA'S{i], but
that'sbeside the point.) I don't know if it's because that's the way the
French do it, or because the Norwegian phonotactics forbid a palatal
lateral to occur after a long vowel.

-- 
mu'o mi'e tsali