I think that using a language like that does not facilitate
communications very well. If I refer to the city of {ierucalai,im},
few Americans or Englishmen would recognize Jerusalem. Similarly, if
English-speaking people write {florens} or {neipyls}, Italians might
not recognize Firenze or Napoli, and if I write about the country
{tsarfat}, no Frenchman is going to recognize that.
I believe we do need a standardized way of writing location names. The
easy way is to transcribe one language (such as English as spoken in
Texas) and use that, but that's not very culturally neutral. Another
way is to follow the natives' pronounciation. That means that the
capital of France would be {paRIs} and the capital of the UK would be
{landen}. That creates a whole new set of problems, because everybody
is used to seeing the common spelling (London) and {landen} looks
plain strange. Also, some places are known around the world by a
different name (often historical) than the name the natives use.
Germany is known by its inhabitants as {doitclend}. And one more
thing, even the natives are sometimes divided: {ierucalai,im} is known
by its Arab population as either {urucalim} or {alKUDS}.
So I do think we need standardized names to facilitate communication,
but my best suggestion is to start with the native pronounciation, and
change that when there's a sufficiently large group of Lojban-speakers
in that place. For example, the capital of the UK might be better
spelled (and pronounced!) as {london} - this is both more familiar
visually, and it aligns with how many non-English people say that name.
On Jan 5, 2008, at 1:05 PM, Isen hand wrote:
I would use whatever I would Use! Or in your case whatever
pronunciation you would use. So, you would write it using your
native Russian pronunciation and I using my native English
pronunciation (adding an "s" on the end). The thing with
pronunciation is it differs from place to place even within a
country. Take for example the Englsih city of Bath. Even in England
there are 4 differnet ways to pronounce it.
----- Original Message ----
From: Мария Карманова <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org
Sent: Saturday, 5 January, 2008 11:00:04 AM
Subject: [lojban-beginners] towns and countries
Hello!
My name is Mari, I study lojban since December. But English is my
third
language after Russian and German, so I have a question: when I
lojbanize a name of a country or a town, what pronounsation schould
i use as
base? For example, Moscow can be la moskou., but when I translate from
Russian it can be la moskwAs. And Russia: la racas. or la rosIas?
