Lojban In General

> The Hmong language has two dialects in America (I don't know about dialects
> in
> Asia), Hmoob Dawb (White Hmong) and Moob Leeg (Green Mong). The name could
> be
> Lojbanized as "xmon", but that might be disliked by the Moob Leeg, who
> don't
> have the "hm" sound. It could be "mon", but there's another language called
> Mon, in the Mon-Khmer family. So what is the Lojban word for Hmong?

zo .ymon. co'e drani xu pei

mu'o mi'e kiris

Posted by PierreAbbat on Sun 18 of Jan, 2009 10:57 GMT posts: 324

On Saturday 17 January 2009 22:39:58 Chris Done wrote:
> zo .ymon. co'e drani xu pei

.ie .i ma tairmupli lo ka brivla zo .ymon?

mu'omi'e .pier.

To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org
with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.

Pierre Abbat wrote:
> The Hmong language has two dialects in America (I don't know about dialects in
> Asia), Hmoob Dawb (White Hmong) and Moob Leeg (Green Mong). The name could be
> Lojbanized as "xmon", but that might be disliked by the Moob Leeg, who don't
> have the "hm" sound. It could be "mon", but there's another language called
> Mon, in the Mon-Khmer family. So what is the Lojban word for Hmong?
>
> Pierre
>
>
>
Pierre, I'm sure you agree that we should make a point of look at the actual pronunciation of a foreign name by the locals, rather than its conventional English spelling or pronunciation. In the case of "Hmong", these seem to be reasonably close. Wikipedia give the Hmong word for Hmong as mɔ̃ŋ, with the m either voiced or devoiced according to dialect, just as you indicate. However, I would tend to make voiceless m into "m" in Lojban, anyway, so I don't think there's a conflict as far as fu'ivla are concerned. "Mon", on the other hand, appears to be mun in Burmese or, more importantly, man in Mon. So, assuming that there are no other conflicts, I would make "Hmong" = {mon} and "Mon" = {man}.

I suppose there will always tend to be a lot of conflicts, though, when it comes to these short cultural words, since there are so many of them. We might be inclined to add an additional morpheme from the source language as filler. For instance, the name of the main Chinese ethnic group, the 汉 Hàn, could become {xan} in Lojban, but it might had better be {xanjen} from 汉人 Hànrén (Han people) or {xanzus} from 汉族 Hànzú (Han ethnicity).

-Nat

To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org
with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.