Proper nouns and names

[Taytanchik]

Using 5-syllable words is surely a better approach than using that Sudre alphabet.

Anyhow, one question that rises is: When do we stop assigning words/names to places? Down to which size?
I think I need to explain what I mean:
Europe HAS it's own Solresol name - that's ok
Now we assign names to European states - that'll be around 50 (and countless more IF we were to name historic states as well, that don't exist today, like Prussia, the Roman Empire etc.)
What about regions? Like French departements, German Bundesländer, US states?
I have not the slightest idea what number would come up when only counting in Europe... several hundreds for sure. Not to mention cities, towns and villages... it's impossible to assign srs names for each of these, unless we go for 6- 7- and 8-syllable words or just give names to the bigger cities. (but then, what about the smaller ones? :/ )

The only solution I could come up is to use a systematic approach (translation or transcription or ???) which can offer (near) unlimited names for every place, no matter how small or unknown.

Translating has some difficulties: First, the translation could become lengthy and cumbersome, depending on the meaning of that proper name. Second, the name might be untranslatable because the meaning is obscure or unknown. What's the meaning of Paris? London? Where I live there's a city named "Tübingen": -ingen is merely a suffix meaning "founded by X", in this case by a man named Tubo. Now well, what does Tubo mean? Noone knows...

Transcribing would be comparatively easy, since you don't have to know anything special but the pronunciation of the name. You could then use a set of transcription rules to convert the name to a solresol name and voilà, there you go. To be fair, this method is not without flaw: First, which pronunciation is used?
Paris = [pa'ri:]French ['paeris]English [pa'ri:s]German... which to use? Best choice would probably be using the native pronunciation - if only for consistency's sake!
Second, Solresol syllables are few. Can you even call a transcription as such, when you have only 7 syllables to represent the whole world of sounds? Probably... not.

Nonetheless I would like to promote - shamelessly - my transcription proposal in the last post again. Please have a look and leave some comment about it. Maybe you can think of something better...

p.s.
Of course there could and probably will be a mixture of two or more systems - most likely unique srs words for countries and bigger cities and translations/transcriptions of everything smaller.

p.p.s.
Same of course with personal names - I could see people using translations or transcriptions of their names, or using a unique, self-given srs name, with no connection to the original name of that person.

[Shido]

I'm having problems with my scanner, so I took a pic with my camera. I don't know why it rotated I can try to play with it some more later, but can you guys see what I mean? That there are some notes shaded in (full notes) and some that are 3/4 notes? If not, like I said, I'll try again.

Here is above-mentioned picture, which I have taken from site “www.uniovi.es/solresol/” (unfortunately, now it doesn’t exist; but there is a copy of it at the “Web Archive”: http://web.archive.org/web/200708310605 ... /solresol/).

[xadrezo]

First shot for a transcription guideline:
do: dental consonants - d, t, th?
re: velar consonants - r, g, k, h
mi: nasals - n, m, ng
fa: labial and bilabial - f, v, w, b, p
sol: sibilants - s, z, sh
la: liquids - l, (spanish r)
si: ? maybe consonants like "sh" "ch"

I like this idea.

Edit: But how would you write 'y'?

[Solsimisi]

A possibility that I propose is creating something akin to Japanese Katakana. Using the current syllables, we can combine two to form new syllables. I think "Dosilado" (fragment) for the system would be fitting, as it's fragments of traditional Solresol used for transcription of foreign language words into Solresol and the writing of loan words.

General list (dominant + subordinate):
re + do = ro
re + mi = ri
re + la = ra (could remove if we don't want to differentiate the liquids too much)

do + re = de
do + fa = da
do + si = di

mi + re = me
mi + do = mo
mi + fa = ma

fa + re = fe
fa + do = fo
fa + si = fi

la + re = le
la + do = lo
la + si = li

si + re = se
si + do = so
si + la = sa

Due to Solresol characters, I omitted sol (since the horizontal bar is used for doubling of a syllable). In this situation, we'd use the native pronunciation and approximate it with Dosilado. A few examples:
Paris = Fari
Tokyo = Dodido/Dolido?
Helicopter = Relisoldero
(Though I advocate making words for things such as helicopter.)

In stenography, the characters would combine by overlapping completely. To quickly notice the dominance, the dominant character would extend above the subordinate character (so vertical emphasis). (I'll draw up each Dosilado character.) This system would require a bit more structure for stenography.

For color and numbers, what Sudre suggested for flags could be applied: the dominant and subordinate characters above and below, respectively. Hence, ri would be orange on top of yellow for colors. Likewise, ri would be 2/3 (two thirds) for numbers. (Though I don't get the number system as it seems awkward for mathematical communication.)

Musical and signed seem a bit harder to work with, but I'll think about it.

[Doresifado]

First shot for a transcription guideline:
do: dental consonants - d, t, th?
re: velar consonants - r, g, k, h
mi: nasals - n, m, ng
fa: labial and bilabial - f, v, w, b, p
sol: sibilants - s, z, sh
la: liquids - l, (spanish r)
si: ? maybe consonants like "sh" "ch"

General list (dominant + subordinate):
re + do = ro
re + mi = ri
re + la = ra (could remove if we don't want to differentiate the liquids too much)

do + re = de
do + fa = da
do + si = di

mi + re = me
mi + do = mo
mi + fa = ma

fa + re = fe
fa + do = fo
fa + si = fi

la + re = le
la + do = lo
la + si = li

si + re = se
si + do = so
si + la = sa

I actually like both of these ideas. I think from here we should just try out producing different texts in Solresol and see which conventions work. For me, part of the coolness of Solresol is that it can be expressed in so many different ways (colors, numbers, hand signals, etc.) and we should try to preserve that when we incorporate proper names into the language. I think we could adjust the color or hand signal system to work with these methods...not so sure what to do when it comes to numbers.

Also, I think we should keep in mind that Sudre was definitely focused on simplicity (e.g. redofafa? = "how are you?"). I bring this up, because if say we used Solsimisi's method or Sudre's phonetic alphabet for written Solresol (letters) and write Pari/Dari for "Paris," I think then the convention would have to be something like saying "the big city in France/Europe" when the message is converted into numbers or colors. Hopefully context would make it clear to all involved in the message. What do you guys think?

[Taytanchik]

First shot for a transcription guideline:
do: dental consonants - d, t, th?
re: velar consonants - r, g, k, h
mi: nasals - n, m, ng
fa: labial and bilabial - f, v, w, b, p
sol: sibilants - s, z, sh
la: liquids - l, (spanish r)
si: ? maybe consonants like "sh" "ch"

I like this idea.

Edit: But how would you write 'y'?

That's probably the main flaw of this system. Actually this goes for independent vowels in general, as I have focused on representing consonants, not vowels.
Normally you would just pick out the/some consonants of the proper noun you would like to transcribe and use the according solresol-syllable. This should work for most names and proper nouns... I guess?!

The system fails, though, whenever you encounter a noun beginning with a vowel, or even worse a vowel-only noun!
An option to deal with initial-vowel nouns could be to just leave out the vowel and start the transcription with the first consonant. (instead of "America" you would just transcribe "Merica", which would become "mirere"...)

As for vowel-only nouns, this method won't do. I can imagine to just switch to vowel-based transcription in these cases. This means, the transcription would include lots of consonants where there were none before, but I don't see any other way...

Words like Japanese "aoi" could thus be "transcribed" as lA-dO-sI... not too beautiful. :/
Hopefully there aren't too many vowel-only words in the world's languages.

Of course this could also be used as an alternative way to cope with initial vowels: For example, lamirere for "(l)America".

We could use: la for (initial) [a], re for [e], si for and sol for [o] and .

......

I was just reading the original question again "Edit: But how would you write 'y'?" and realized that you probably were talking about the half-vowel [j] and not vowels. ^_^"

Actually I would put the half-vowel y in the si-group, imagining it as the syllable for all the palatal sounds: sh, ch, j, the German ich-sound and the half-vowel y.

[PetGabM]

First shot for a transcription guideline:
do: dental consonants - d, t, th?
re: velar consonants - r, g, k, h
mi: nasals - n, m, ng
fa: labial and bilabial - f, v, w, b, p
sol: sibilants - s, z, sh
la: liquids - l, (spanish r)
si: ? maybe consonants like "sh" "ch"

I'm all for this method, but I have a few changes.
Consonants like 'sh' and 'ch' can be moved to 'sol,' (since 'sh' is there already) and 'si' would be used for "y's," "j's," and other sounds.

As for all-vowel words, we can use this system:
la: a
re: e
mi: i
do: o
sol: u
fa: schwa sound.

si would be at the beginning and end of the word are to signify that it's an all-vowel word. As far as I know, half-vowel sounds don't start words very often, and almost never start AND end a word, so I think that it would work.

I'm just throwing out an idea, of course. Any changes?

[Solsimisi]

Also, I think we should keep in mind that Sudre was definitely focused on simplicity (e.g. redofafa? = "how are you?"). I bring this up, because if say we used Solsimisi's method or Sudre's phonetic alphabet for written Solresol (letters) and write Pari/Dari for "Paris," I think then the convention would have to be something like saying "the big city in France/Europe" when the message is converted into numbers or colors. Hopefully context would make it clear to all involved in the message. What do you guys think?

Simplicity -- overall -- is still fairly well preserved with the fractional concept I mention for Dosilado's writing in color and number systems. The convention you suggest wouldn't solve the problem at hand (incredibly long words) since that problem would simply resurface as a long string of numbers or colors, only the alphabet system would have a solution. D:

[domi~dofadofa~soldo]

First shot for a transcription guideline:
do: dental consonants - d, t, th?
re: velar consonants - r, g, k, h
mi: nasals - n, m, ng
fa: labial and bilabial - f, v, w, b, p
sol: sibilants - s, z, sh
la: liquids - l, (spanish r)
si: ? maybe consonants like "sh" "ch"

I'm all for this method, but I have a few changes.
Consonants like 'sh' and 'ch' can be moved to 'sol,' (since 'sh' is there already) and 'si' would be used for "y's," "j's," and other sounds.

As for all-vowel words, we can use this system:
la: a
re: e
mi: i
do: o
sol: u
fa: schwa sound.

si would be at the beginning and end of the word are to signify that it's an all-vowel word. As far as I know, half-vowel sounds don't start words very often, and almost never start AND end a word, so I think that it would work.

I'm just throwing out an idea, of course. Any changes?

I like the idea! But of course it would lead to very long names and in some cases would be words that already exist in Solresol (I'm apparently repulsive). How about we use something that doesn't exist yet in Solresol: triple-syllable words. What I mean is like dododo or rerere etc. They aren't taking up any room and using that plus the system suggest, it could I think word.

So maybe for america:

dododo~milare? (I don't know if I fully understand the system)

In conclusion, I think we should use the triple-syllables to designate things that are hard in Solresol. Maybe dododo for names, rerere for loanwords, stuff like that?


~~

[PetGabM]

But of course it would lead to very long names and in some cases would be words that already exist in Solresol

I don't think they would end up being too long, since we're only using the consonants, and skipping vowels.

triple-syllable words. What I mean is like dododo or rerere etc. They aren't taking up any room and using that plus the system suggest, it could I think work...

I think we should use the triple-syllables to designate things that are hard in Solresol. Maybe dododo for names, rerere for loanwords, stuff like that?

It definitely would work, but it would be best if we could find a use for tripling all seven syllables.

dododo~milare? (I don't know if I fully understand the system)

Looks like you understand it, but I think it would be dododomirere, not dododomilare

~Gabe