On 10/11/07, Yoav Nir <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi. > > I'm new to studying lojban, and am working my way through "Lojban for > beginners" > > I have a few questions already. > > First, is how to spell my name. I know the English spelling doesn't give a > lot of clues (it's a Hebrew name). It's pronounced as two syllables, the > first is like "Yo" in yonder, the second "av" as in the first syllable of > "avril" in Spanish. I'm guessing that ioav won't cut it because of the three > consecutive vowels, so should it be io,av. Also am I supposed to capitalize > the second syllable (io,AV) to show where the stress is every time, or is > that optional?
My American pronunciation of "yonder" has the lojban "a" in the first syllable. Click the Sound Sample link to hear it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel Lojban "o" is pronounced like this sound sample: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_back_rounded_vowel > Second, I've read that lojban names have to end in a consonant, so if they > don't, we add one. My question is, do we pronounce the 's' in la meiris ? Yes. There are no silent characters in Lojban. Lojbanization of a name usually changes the pronunciation, not just the spelling. > Third, I've seen that the apostrophe is used to make an 'h' sound, whereas > the h character is not used. Why is that? Why didn't the inventors of > lojban (or does it date back to loglan?) simply use an h for the h sound? Because they wanted it to be immediately clear that this sound/character set served a special morphological seperating function similar to punctuation, separating vowel pairs. It is not permissable to use outside that function. The morphological rules give permissable sequences of C V ' (consonant, vowel, "h" sound). Had it been an "h" character, it would not have been immediately visible that it is considered neither a consonant or a vowel for purposes of the rules. > That's it for now. I'm sure I'll have more questions as I go on. > > mi'e io,AV > Thanks for your questions! Keep them coming. -Eppcott
