My lojbanic name

As is explained in the first chapter of “Lojban for Beginners“, we have to “Lojbanise” names. It’s common to start learning how to introduce yourself in a language, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Names in lojban are called cmene (remember that c it’s pronounced like sh), and they have to follow some rules:

1. End in a consonant.
2. Followed by a pause (period).
3. It’s not permited to have the words la, lai or doi embedded in them.

Some names can be lojbanised without any changes. Unfortunately, it’s not my case; my name (either Leo or Leonardo) ends in a vowel and my surname (Molas) contains la in it. This isn’t really nice for me to change it, but it has to be done.

Capital letters aren’t used in lojban as in English or other languages. Usually, words in lojban are stressed on the last-but-one syllable; if a non-lojbanic word (like a name) is stressed in other syllable, you can capitalize it.

So, my name won’t start as usual with a capital letter. I wonder why this little difference. I think it’s because there is no more reason to use them, but to distinguish names from other words. Nevertheless, when we speak, we can’t “hear” them. In the other hand, Lojban stablishes that names end in consonants, and are followed by a pause; we actually can hear names with this.

From all this, I think my “names” would be:

• Leo: leos.
• Leonardo: leonardos.
• Leo Molas: leos.molys.

I don’t like how molys. sounds . (The y, called “schwa”, it’s an unstressed vowel, and sounds like the a in above.)

kribacr was the first one writing a comment in this blog (thank you so much! and thanks to xorxes and stela too!), and started it with the lojbanic sentence:

coi .li,o.molas. mi’e .kribacr.

At first, I didn’t understand it, but it’s clear that my name is there, and so is his. He might have written mine “li,o” because in English it is pronounced more like a /LEE-o/, but in Spanish is /LE-o/.

According to the Lojban dictionary (you can download the pdf here), coi is “hello” and mi’e is a kind “I am”; so, if I want to introduce myself, I’d say:

mi’e leos.molys.

– EDIT –

As many commented here, there is a new way (an unofficial one… yet) to “translate” names into lojban, without the ugly deformations.

I’ve stopped by the IRC channel (#lojban at the irc.freenode.net server — for the first time ) and I met some nice people willing to help (even myself that I’m far far far away from an “advanced” student).

As timos, lindar and xorxes commented here, starting the name with a pause (the dot “.”) solves the “la/lai/doi” problem (thanks to komfn at the IRC channel for this). Also, I can avoid putting an “s” after leo in .leos.molas. if I change the dot for a comma. As I would like to be called just Leo among friends, in Lojban I’d just be called .leos., so to keep it always that way, when I also say my family name, I would say .leos.molas. .

In conclusion, I’d like to introduce myself saying:

mi’e .leos.molas.

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