Lojbanizing place names

[rricci@axcrnc.cern.ch]

Hello guys,
I'm an Italian theoretical physicist who's come in contact with the Lojban
world while playing with WWW at CERN in Geneva.
I'd like to make some remarks upon all that stuff about Lojbanization of
geographical names most of you have been writing about in the last weeks.
I must premise that, as a new subscriber, I'm not much deep in the Lojban
project in all its technical details, so my comments could well be found
too naive and superficial to be taken into serious account.
I cannot avoid thinking, though, that your approach to the problem of
using "foreign" proper names in Lojban is exaggeratedly ambitious on
one side and astonishingly simple-minded on the other side.
Surely you're not saying we have a real chance
to succeed in Lojbanizing the almost unconceivable amount of proper names
used in natural languages all over the world, are you? Not to mention the
infinitesimally subtle problems concerning different local pronunciation
of the same name in, say, American English, what about rendering in the
phonetically poor Lojban alphabet exotic sounds like the 'xh' in Xhosa, which
is pronounced as a click, or the throaty sound found at the
beginning of the very word "'arab" in Arabic? That's not the only major
difficulty: Lojbanizing Chinese names without taking care of unavoidable
tones is both meaningless to a Chinese native-speaker and perversely
complicated for a non-Chinese, who often doesn't even imagine that "Beijing" is
the correct (though uselessly approximated without tone diacritics) Pinyin
spelling of the familiar "Peking" (or "Pechino" in Italian"). Of course, one
could simply forget about these "second order" difficulties and concentrate in
the Lojbanization of more familiar European languages, which are usually better
suited (by the way, Lojbanization is straightforward for Italian,
provided you adopt the convention of adding an "n" or an "s" to vowel-ending
names - as to say, to *all* names...). But this sounds intolerably Eurocentrical
to my (European) ears!
I'd like to make a very modest proposal (I don't realize whether and
to which extent it is contrary to the genius of Lojban, though).
What against using some sort
of quotation markers to enclose "foreign" words, unfamiliar either to the
speaker/writer or to the vast majority of his audience, spelled in exactly
the same way as they are in their original context (apart from standard
romanization in case of languages which do not use latin alphabet)?
This could be accompanied by some
sort of explicative note in which the speaker suggests a tentative and by no
means exhaustive Lojbanization of the name under concern. In case he had
no idea of how to pronounce the word, he could suggest a conventional
alternative Lojban cmene to be used throughout the speech in substitution of
the original word (something like using individual constants as arguments
of relations in formal logic). One could even conceive a set of cmavo to be
used as individual constants in contexts like that - maybe they're already
there, I don't know...
What do you think?
Bye
   Roberto Ricci