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[Wikineurotic] Wiki page wavelessonscontinuedp0 changed by gleki
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The changes in this version follow below, followed after by the current full page text.
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#.lidz.
#.xelsinkis.
- Answer: ~~grey,grey: #New York: USA
+ Answer: <span style="color: gray;background-color: gray; ">#New York: USA
#Rome: Italy
#Havana: Cuba
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#Athens: Greece (''Athina'' in Greek)
#Leeds: England
- #Helsinki: Finland ~~
+ #Helsinki: Finland </span>
!!!Exercise 3
Lojbanise the following names
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#Tokyo
#San Salvador
- Answer: ~~grey,grey: There are usually alternative spellings for names, either because people pronounce the originals differently, or because the exact sound doesn't exist in Lojban, so you need to choose between two Lojban letters. This doesn't matter, so long as everyone knows who or where you're talking about.
+ Answer: <span style="color: gray;background-color: gray; ">There are usually alternative spellings for names, either because people pronounce the originals differently, or because the exact sound doesn't exist in Lojban, so you need to choose between two Lojban letters. This doesn't matter, so long as everyone knows who or where you're talking about.
#.djon. (or .djan. with some accents)
#.melisys.
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#.maDRID.
#.tokios.
- #.san.salvaDOR. (with Spanish stress) ~~
+ #.san.salvaDOR. (with Spanish stress) </span>
!!Lojban words as names
By now you should be able to Lojbanise your own name. However, if you prefer, you can translate your name into Lojban (if you know what it means, of course) or adopt a completely new Lojban identity. Native Americans generally translate their name when speaking English, partly because they have meaningful names, and partly because they don't expect the ''wasichu'' to be able to pronounce words in Lakota, Cherokee or whatever!
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• Mei Li (Chinese = beautiful) – melbi – .melb.
• Ayhan (Turkish = Moon Lord) – lunra nobli (= lurnobli) – .lurnoblis.
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!Preface. Sounds
The first thing you need to do when you learn a foreign language is to become familiar with the sounds of the language and how they are written, and the same goes for Lojban. Fortunately, Lojban sounds (__phonemes__) are fairly straightforward.
!!Vowels
There are six vowels in Lojban.
||a |as in ''f__a__ther'' (not as in ''h__a__t'')
e |as in ''g__e__t''
i |as in ''mach__i__ne'' or (Italian) ''v__i__no'' (not as in ''h__i__t'')
o |as in ''b__o__ld ''or ''m__o__re''—not as in ''s__o''__ (this should be a 'pure' sound.)
u |as in ''c__oo__l'' (not as in ''b__u__t'') ||
These are pretty much the same as vowels in Italian or Spanish. The sixth vowel, y, is called a __schwa__ in the language trade, and is pronounced like the first and last ''A'''s in ''America'' (that's English ''America'', not Spanish.) It's the sound that comes out when the mouth is completely relaxed.
Two vowels together are pronounced as one sound (__diphthong__). Some examples are:
||ai |as in ''h__igh''__
au |as in ''h__ow''__
ei |as in ''h__ey''__
oi |as in ''b__oy''__
ia |like German ''__Ja''__
ie |like ''__yeah''__
iu |like ''__you''__
ua |as in ''__waah!''__, or French ''q__uoi''__
ue |as in ''q__ue__stion''
uo |as in ''q__uo__te''
ui |like ''__we''__, or French ''__oui''__ ||
Double vowels are rare. The only examples are ii, which is pronounced like English ''ye'' (as in “Oh come all ye faithful”) or Chinese ''yi'', and uu, pronounced like ''woo''.
!!Consonants
Most Lojban consonants are the same as English, but there are some exceptions:
||g |always ''g'' as in ''__g__um'', never ''g'' as in ''__g__em''
c |''sh'', as in ''__sh__ip''
j |as in ''mea__s__ure'' or French ''bon__j__our''
x |as in German ''Ba__ch''__, Spanish ''__J__ose'' or Arabic ''__Kh__aled'' ||
The English sounds ''ch'' and ''j'' are written as tc and dj.
Lojban doesn't use the letters ''H'', ''Q'' or ''W''.
!!Special Characters
Lojban does not require any punctuation, but some special characters (normally used in punctuation in other languages) affect the way Lojban is pronounced.
The only one of these characters which is obligatory in Lojban is the apostrophe; in fact the apostrophe is regarded as a proper letter of Lojban. An apostrophe separates two vowels, preventing them from being pronounced together (as a __diphthong__); it is itself pronounced like an ''h''. For example, ui is normally pronounced ''we'', but u'i is ''oohee''.
A full stop (period) is a short pause to stop words running into each other. The rules of Lojban make it easier for one word to run into another when the second word begins with a vowel; so any word starting with a vowel conventionally has a full stop placed in front of it.
Commas are rare in Lojban, but can be used to stop two vowels blurring together when you don't want to use an apostrophe (which would put a ''h'' between them). No Lojban words have commas, but they're sometimes used in writing non-Lojban names, for example pi,ER. (''Pierre''), as opposed to pier. (''P-yerr''), pi.ER. (''Pee; Ehr''), or pi'ER. (''Piherr'').
Capital letters are not normally used in Lojban. We use them in non-Lojban words (like ''Pierre'') when the stress of a word is different from the Lojban norm. The norm is to put the stress on the last-but-one syllable; so, for example, kurmikce 'nurse' is kur__MIK__ce, not __KUR__mikce. The name ''Juliette'' would be written DJUli,et. if pronounced in an English way, but juLIET. if pronounced as in French.
!!Alphabet
In most language textbooks, you get the alphabet of the language together with its sounds. Letters (lerfu) turn out to be even more important than usual in Lojban, so we might as well go through their names quickly.
Consonants are straightforward: the name of a consonant letter is that letter, plus y. So the consonant letters of Lojban, ''b, c, d, f, g ...'', are called by., cy., dy., fy., gy.... in Lojban (using the full stop as we've just described.)
Vowels ''would'' be called .ay, .ey, .iy, but that would be rather difficult to pronounce. Instead, they are handled by following the vowel sound with the word bu, which basically means 'letter'. So the vowels of Lojban are: .abu, .ebu, .ibu, .obu, .ubu, ybu.
The apostrophe is regarded as a proper letter in Lojban, and is called .y'y.. To some people, this sounds like a cough; to other, like ''uh-huh'' (when it means 'Yes' rather than 'No'.)
Lojban has ways of refering to most letters you can think of; see ''The Complete Lojban Language'', Chapter 17 for details. If you have the urge to spell out your name in Lojban and have an ''H'', ''Q'', or ''W'' to deal with, you can use .y'y.bu, ky.bu and vy.bu. So ''Schwarzenegger'' is spelt in Lojban as:
sy. cy. .y'ybu vybu. .abu ry. zy. .ebu ny. .ebu gy. gy. .ebu ry.
And spelling ''that'' is a task the equal of anything the Terminator ever did!
__Exercise 1__
Spell your name in Lojban (or at least something close enough to it to use the twenty-six letters of English we have learned, and the apostrophe.)
!! 'Correct' pronunciation
You don't have to be very precise about Lojban pronunciation, because the phonemes are distributed so that it is hard to mistake one sound for another. This means that rather than one 'correct' pronunciation, there is a range of acceptable pronunciation—the general principle is that anything is OK so long as it doesn't sound too much like something else. For example, Lojban r can be pronounced like the ''r'' in English, Scottish or French.
Two things to be careful of, though, are pronouncing Lojban i and u like Standard British English ''hit'' and ''but'' (Northern English ''but'' is fine!). This is because non-Lojban vowels, particularly these two, are used to separate consonants by people who find them hard to say. For example, if you have problems spitting out the zd in zdani (house), you can say zɪdani—where the ''ɪ'' is very short, but the final ''i'' has to be long.
!!Lojban Names (cmene)
Watch any film where people don't know each other's language. They start off saying things like “Me Tarzan,” which is as good a place to start learning Lojban as any. So here we go.
mi'e .robin.
I-am-named Robin
I'm Robin
mi'e is related to mi, which is 'I', 'me' and so on. It's a good example of the apostrophe separating two vowels, and sounds a bit like ''me heh''.
This guy Robin is lucky because his name goes directly into Lojban without any changes. However, there are some rules for Lojban names which mean that some names have to be 'Lojbanised'. This may sound strange—after all, a name is a name—but in fact all languages do this to some extent. For example, English speakers tend to pronounce ''Jose'' something like ''Hozay'', and ''Margaret'' in Chinese is ''Magelita''. Some sounds just don't exist in some languages, so the first thing you need to do is rewrite the name so that it only contains Lojban sounds, and is spelt in a Lojban way.
__Note: __The catch here is, what version of the sounds will you be using? For English in particular, British and American vowels can be quite different. The British version of ''Robin'' is reasonably approximated by .robin.; but the American version is closer to rabyn. or rab,n.. And within America and Britain, there is also a good deal of variation. So you should take the transliterations given below with a grain of salt.
Let's take the English name ''Susan''. The two ''s'''s are pronounced differently—the second one is actually a ''z''—and the ''a'' is not really an ''a'' sound, it's the 'schwa' we just mentioned. So ''Susan'' comes out in Lojban as .suzyn..
You may have noticed two extra full stops (periods) there. This is necessary because if you didn't pause, you might not know where the previous word ended and the next word began. For example:
You should also put a full stop in between a person's first and last names (though it's not compulsory), so ''Jim Jones'' becomes djim.djonz..
An important rule for Lojbanising names is that the last letter of a cmene (Lojban name) must be a consonant. Again, this is to prevent confusion as to where a name ends, and what is and is not a name (all other Lojban words end in a vowel). We usually use ''s'' for this; so in Lojban, ''Mary'' becomes .meris. , ''Joe'' becomes .djos. and so on. An alternative is to leave out the last vowel, so ''Mary'' would become .mer. or .meir..
The final point is stress. As we've seen, Lojban words are stressed on the penultimate syllable, and if a name has different stress, we use capital letters. This means that the English and French names ''Robert'' come out differently in Lojban: the English name is .robyt. in UK English, or .rab,rt. in some American dialects, but the French is .roBER. .
To give an idea of how all this works, here are some names of famous people in their own language and in Lojban.
||__English__
Margaret Thatcher |.magryt.tatcys. (no ''th'' in Lojban because most people around the world can't say it!)
Mick Jagger |.mik.djagys. ||
||__French__
Napoleon Bonaparte |.napole,ON.bonaPART.
Juliette Binoche |.juLIET.binOC. ||
||__Chinese__
Laozi |.laudz.
Mao Zedong |.maudzyDYN. (Final ''ng'' is in Lojban conventionally turned into n.) ||
||__Turkish__
Mustafa Kemal |.MUStafas.keMAL.
Erkin Koray |.erkin.korais. ||
||__German__
Friedrich Nietzsche |.fridrix.nitcys.
Clara Schumann |.klaras.cuman. ||
||__Spanish__
Isabel Allende |.izaBEL.aiendes.
Che Guevara |.tcegevaras. ||
!!!Exercise 2
Where are these places?
#.nu,IORK.
#.romas.
#.xavanas.
#.kardif.
#.beidjin.
#.ANkaras.
#.ALbekerkis.
#.vankuver.
#.keiptaun.
#.taibeis.
#.bon.
#.delis.
#.nis.
#.atinas.
#.lidz.
#.xelsinkis.
Answer: <span style="color: gray;background-color: gray; ">#New York: USA
#Rome: Italy
#Havana: Cuba
#Cardiff: Wales (The Welsh for ''Cardiff'' is ''Caerdydd'', which would Lojbanise to something like kairdyd..)
#Beijing: China
#Ankara: Turkey
#Albequerque: New Mexico, USA
#Vancouver: Canada
#Cape Town: South Africa
#Taipei: Taiwan (note b, not p. Although actually, the b in Pinyin is pronounced as a p... But this isn't meant to be a course on Mandarin!)
#Bonn: Germany
#Delhi: India (The Hindi for ''Delhi'' is ''Dillî'', which would give diliys. or dili'is..)
#Nice: France
#Athens: Greece (''Athina'' in Greek)
#Leeds: England
#Helsinki: Finland </span>
!!!Exercise 3
Lojbanise the following names
#John
#Melissa
#Amanda
#Matthew
#Michael
#David Bowie
#Jane Austen
#William Shakespeare
#Sigourney Weaver
#Richard Nixon
#Istanbul
#Madrid
#Tokyo
#San Salvador
Answer: <span style="color: gray;background-color: gray; ">There are usually alternative spellings for names, either because people pronounce the originals differently, or because the exact sound doesn't exist in Lojban, so you need to choose between two Lojban letters. This doesn't matter, so long as everyone knows who or where you're talking about.
#.djon. (or .djan. with some accents)
#.melisys.
#.amandys. (again, depending on your accent, the final y may be a, the initial a may be y, and the middle a may be e.)
#.matius.
#.maikyl. or .maik,l. , depending on how you say it.
#.deivyd.bau,is. or .bo,is. (but not .bu,is. — that's the knife)
#.djein.ostin.
#.uiliam.cekspir.
#.sigornis.uivyr. or .sygornis.uivyr.
#.ritcyrd.niksyn.
#.istanBUL. with English stress, .IStanbul. with American, .istanbul. with Turkish. Lojbanists generally prefer to base cmene on local pronunciation, but this is not an absolute rule.
#.maDRID.
#.tokios.
#.san.salvaDOR. (with Spanish stress) </span>
!!Lojban words as names
By now you should be able to Lojbanise your own name. However, if you prefer, you can translate your name into Lojban (if you know what it means, of course) or adopt a completely new Lojban identity. Native Americans generally translate their name when speaking English, partly because they have meaningful names, and partly because they don't expect the ''wasichu'' to be able to pronounce words in Lakota, Cherokee or whatever!
All Lojban words (as opposed to cmene) end in a vowel, and although you ''can'' use them as names as they stand, it's common to leave out the final vowel to make it absolutely clear that this is a name and not something else (Lojban goes for overkill when it comes to possible misunderstanding). So if your name or nickname is ''Cat'' (Lojban mlatu), you can either add s like a normal cmene to make .mlatus., or just chop the end off and call yourself .mlat. .
Here are a few examples:
• Fish – finpe – .finp.
• Björn (Scandinavian = bear) – cribe – .crib.
• Green – crino – .crin.
• Mei Li (Chinese = beautiful) – melbi – .melb.
• Ayhan (Turkish = Moon Lord) – lunra nobli (= lurnobli) – .lurnoblis.
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