Roy McCoy | Re: “Imajinar”
George Boeree wrote:
> The purpose of LFN is to become the single international auxiliary
> language for the world.
Wow. I'm glad to see this serious, if audacious, statement of intention,
and I hope it will be constantly remembered. In line with this, I go back
to George's earlier defense of "imajinar":
> as for "imajina" and "relijion," it is simply a matter of keeping to
> LFN's phonemic principle -- spell it as you say it! And, since LFN
> is based on the western romance languages, and all of them use the
> fricative/affricative pronunciation, we went with j. It is sometimes
> unavoidable to make such choices if you want to stick to a principle!
Don't I know it! I've often encountered such discomfiting points in
Esperanto reform, the first one coming to mind being the pressure to
use "q" and "x" for the sounds of "ch" and "sh" in English ("c^" and
"s^" in Esperanto), in deference to the respectable phonetic principle
well established by Esperanto of one letter for one sound. The options
are limited, and none of them in this case appear to be fully satisfactory.
Using "ch" and "sh" as in the Fundamental "h" surrogate writing system
and in Ido, for example, generally looks better to most people, but
offensively violates the good phonetic principle. Neither does simply
leaving "q" and "x" and these sounds out of the alphabet fully satisfy,
as then the phonetic system is correspondingly impoverished, and you
lose two potentially useful letters of the universally established
international latin alphabet - another annoyance.
Here, however, in the case of "g" versus "j", I don't see that such
a possibly unsolvable problem exists, and I'll stand by what I stated
before: that Esperanto here demonstrates that pronunciation may conform
conveniently to orthography rather than vice versa. Indeed, one isn't
yet "saying it" much in LFN, and different languages pronounce the "g"
differently anyway.
Moving back to the stated purpose of LFN, I note that a natural look
is certainly a strong plus in the selling-it-to-everyone department.
One can supposably accept "disionario", for example, though such a form
conforms in neither orthography nor pronunciation - because it's somehow
inoffensive. "Imajinar" and "relijio", on the other hand, are jolting.
So without even having learned LFN, I'll announce a variant differing
in that single detail, "g" in place of "j". Being consistent about this
would, indeed, perhaps create some phonetical howlers: "garago", for
example, or "avantago". But if "religio" and "imagi" are okay - which
they are - then other newly hard-g words may be acceptable as well,
and probably more so than "barbaric" misformations that bring to mind
the more unfortunate of the many failed projects of Esperanto reform.
Roy McCoy