History: Turkey

Source of version: 1 (current)

A test case for cmene/fu'ivla creation, or how seriously do we take our phonology rules? The native word is ''Türkiye'', where ''ü'' represents a front rounded vowel, as in German. ''Turkiye'' would be morphologically impossible in a native Turkish word, because native words have to have either front vowels or back vowels, not both. Now officially Lojban vowels are independent of rounding. (People usually round ''o'' and ''u'' because their native languages do, and ((John Cowan|I)) round ''y'' as well to help distinguish it from sloppy ''a''.) Therefore, the Lojban counterpart of ''ü'' should be its unrounded version ''i'', leading to a protoform ''tirki,ie" or the like. Nevertheless, this is strongly resisted. People, perhaps influenced by the spelling or by the English form, ''think'' of the first vowel as a ''u'', and the resultant protoform is ''turki,ie'' or something like it. ((Nick Nicholas)) has weighed in on the side of ''u'' (but of course he is a Greek :-) ). * And Nick now believes John is right, and has used ''tirkie'' in his latest Lojban prose (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/9782) -- nitcion See also (irrelevantly) ((terki)).