Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Transliterations survey

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 15:56:23 EDT

In a message dated 8/7/2001 9:35:01 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> like /xirosima/ & /xukusima/ is consistent not 
> necessarily with a mapping between Lojban phonetics and Japanese 
> phonetics but with a mapping between Lojban phonology and 
> 
This seems the best solution and may even be a help for some of those cases 
where two languages compete to name a place: Lojban might provide a single 
item compatible with both. There are two problems, though:
1) can Lojban, with something like 25 phonemes aways provide a useful mapping 
of phonemes in other languages (English mildly, Georgian horrifically, 
Sanskrit somewhere in between)?
2) Yuen Ren Chao's second most famous paper -- after his scrambled egg recipe 
-- is "The Non-uniqueness of Phonemic Solutions" which demonstrates that 
there are at least half-a-dozen equally valid phenmeic systems for (in this 
case) his native brand of Chinese. Which system do we take as a meaningful 
one to match up with Lojban? (note: I like the /m/ for /n/, /n/ for /ng/ 
solution, but the vowels are still in turmooil in Lojban transcriptions).