turkey

A test case for cmene/fu'ivla creation, or how seriously do we take our phonology rules?

The native word is T�rkiye, where � 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 round y as well to help distinguish it from sloppy a.) Therefore, the Lojban counterpart of � 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.