Place names

[Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab>]

Now I'm hoping the proposals for latitude/longitude place names aren't
serious.  If so, this effort is getting out of hand in a totally
negative way.

The goal for having a set of place names in the upcoming book has 2 or 3
purposes, which dictate the approach that should be taken.

When reasonably fluent Lojban speakers want to refer to a country or a city,
they will use a name.  Most such speakers are English speakers.  On an ad-hoc
basis, they will tend to use the English name for the place, Lojbanized if only
by adding a trailing consonant.  This is undesirable in a language that is
striving for cultural neutrality.  We have to give people a workable, usable
example of an alternative, or they will do what we don't want them to.

The 'obvious' answer is to use the country and city names that the people
themselves use WHEN TALKING TO FOREIGNERS.  This will typically be the
'official name' or the name in some official language or languages (I have no
problem with giving multiple names for Switzerland reflecting the multiple
names they themselves use in official capacities.)  We could make life easy
and just use the name that a country is listed with the U.N. as, but I suspect
that may be limited by the official languages of the U.N.

We also have to deal with the problem of how names look on paper as well as
in sound.  If exactly matching the sound AS pronounced by the natives gives
a textual name that no one will recognize without reading aloud, people
won't use it - they will use la'o with delimiters and just give the text
string as it appears in some other language.  We want LOJBANIZED names.

It might be nice to have some absolutely rigid way to encode each natural l
language's phonology into Lojban, but we don't - there are 6000 languages,
for one thing.  So lets try to get away from some absolute phonetic mapping
system.  The average person doesn't know that mapping system, hence won't
use it, any more than he knows the latitude and Longitude of Moskva
(and what is the latitude and longtude of RUSSIA, by the way, as distinct from
Moskva).

Another problem, mentioned by Nick in private mail, is that there are multiple
dialects of each language.  He suggested, quite wisely, that use of
the Strine dialect pronunciation la .austrailias. would be seen by Australians
as being a parody, especially by those who don't speak such as extreme
dialectical pronunciation.

Preservation of the written form is desirable, and can resolve such problems.
But if carried to too much of an extreme, it becomes useless for Lojban as a
spoken language.  Since we here in DC are about the only active SPEAKERS, I
feel a need to speak up and defend the necessity of having the langauge make
sense to those who speak it and hear it.  For country and city names, this
means that you can't go making a name into something the local speakers who
would use the name are going to have problems with.  Thus when we tried
to put Nihon/Nippon for Japan into a gismu, we quickly decided that
nixno or nipno would not be acceptable, since Japanese speakers would not be
abale to pronounce the words without heavily buffering them.  We chose to
avoid the 'x' entirely and made the gismu "ponjo", with the 'J' from Japan
for those people who want the hook, while providing a consonant cluster
that the japanese speaker may not need to buffer.

For Hungary, the official name is "Magyar".  We are respecting the people
of that country by calling it la magiar. instead of la xngaris, which is
neither visually recognizable or the local name of the country.

Albania has that 'q' that has no Lojban counterpart.  But if you look at
the name of the country on a postage stamp (where it is all caps), it is
easy to not notice the cross on the 'q', giving what seems to me the
obvious la  shopeiras.  This isn't going to be how the natives pronounce it,
but they would probably recognize it if a Lojbanist said it without too much
difficulty, as being an attempt to respect their self-identity, as opposed to
la .albeinias.

To do London as la london. would give a name that I doubt that most British
speakers would pronounce correctly on reading.  They would see it and knowing
the name being referred to, slip into the non-matching British pronunciation.
Having the spelling differ from the native spelling is thus useful in
reminding that this is a Lojbanized name, and not the British name.  But if
la lndn. seems too abbrevaited or unrecognizable, try la lond. or la londn.
which will at least allow for the dislike of English speakers for unstressed
'oC' in a final syllable.

'yn' as in la lyndyn is not a good mapping.  Most people don't say 'yn'
distinctly from simple vocalic 'n', and it will degenerate.  This is something
to consider - what kind of errors people are likely to make.

la moskvas*. is technically illegal since it has an impermissible medial.
Lojban assumes that voiced/unvoiced combinations will degenerate to either
voiced or unvoiced.  For people's personal names, I don;t intend to push this
issue, but let people spell their names as they wish, even if imperfect
Lojban rules are used - I want people to use a Lojbanized name for themselves
before they are likely to have learned those rules.  But for a list in a
reference book, the names should be well-formed, with no illegal "la"s and
no mismatched consonants.  THus, the Russian capital should be changed, and
reflect thepreference most likely to be acceptable to the Russian speakers.
If we don't know that preference, the I would say to go with la moskfas since
that preserves the highly recognized first syllable in print unchanged.
But I could live with la mosgvas. if Ivan thinks it would be preferred,
or any other minor change.

This job SHOULDN'T be as hard as people seem to be making it, especially
since I will accept multiple answers if multiple language populations are
involved.  The important thing to me is to eliminate unwitting Anglicisms
from the names where inapprpriate, and to make the pronunciations reasonable
for botht the native speakers and for Lojbanists in general, while optimally
preserving some visual recognition for those people who don't speak the
language as much as they write it.  (A good point to remember is that the
peoplee of the country will be most likely to speak the name.   The people
of other countries, unless possibly adjacent, are more likely to see the name
in print than to speak it in conversation.)

lojbab