Re: Lojbanizing place names

[Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>]

la'o .ibu Roberto Ricci .ibu cusku di'e

> Date:         Fri, 5 Aug 1994 17:22:50 +0200
> From:         rricci@VXCERN.CERN.CH
> Subject:      Lojbanizing place names

[...]
> What against using some sort
> of quotation markers to enclose "foreign" words, unfamiliar either to the
> speaker/writer or to the vast majority of his audience, spelled in exactly
> the same way as they are in their original context (apart from standard
> romanization in case of languages which do not use latin alphabet)?

  There is the cmavo {la'o} which indicates a quoted non-Lojban name
  Quotes can be any Lojban word which is not contained in the quote,
  like at the top of this reply. Often the Lojban initial letteral
  of the name of the source language is used, like {.ibu} for Italian
  or {sy} for Finnish ( < Suomi in Finnish).

> This could be accompanied by some
> sort of explicative note in which the speaker suggests a tentative and by no
> means exhaustive Lojbanization of the name under concern. In case he had
> no idea of how to pronounce the word, he could suggest a conventional
> alternative Lojban cmene to be used throughout the speech in substitution of
> the original word (something like using individual constants as arguments
> of relations in formal logic). One could even conceive a set of cmavo to be
> used as individual constants in contexts like that - maybe they're already
> there, I don't know...

  There are 2 sets of 5 assignable pro-sumti (ko'a, ko'e, ..., ko'u and fo'a,
  fo'e, ..., fo'u. These sets can be arbitrarily expanded using subscripts).

  If I say

     la'o .ibu Roberto Ricci .ibu goi ko'a ...

  I can use the pro-sumti {ko'a} to mean la'o .ibu Roberto Ricci .ibu
  until {ko'a} is re-assigned or the assignment is cancelled.

> What do you think?

  The mechanism is there to use.

> Bye
>   Roberto Ricci

  co'o mi'e veion

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.i mi du la'o sy. Veijo Vilva sy.
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