Subject: Re: [lojban] Pronounciation

From: "Daniel Gudlat" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 13:16:46 +0200

la .elrond. cusku di'e:

> After an initial look-through of the Lojban book, and some reading
> on phonetics and some other pronouciation guides, I came back on the
first
> chapters, and I re-heared the recording of gismu pronounciation that
is
> available on the Internet at
> ftp://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/pub/lojban/
> I mean, especially the recording of the gismu in Lesson 02,
> Exercice 2-1, given as a sample of the tape recording that (?)
accompanies
> the textbook. I do not know who are the two people who made this
> recording, but gee, what horrible english accent they have !!!! (joke)
I
> suggest people who are not native english speakers having a hear of it
and
> comment back here...

It's a recording of Bob and Nora Le Chevalier, AFAIK. But you are right.
Pronounciation is clearly inspired by American English, although Nora's
pronounciation is far clearer than Bob's.

> One problem is the quality of the recording itself. The low sampling
rate
> induces some possible confusion between unvoiced and voiced stops in
> consonant clusters or at beginning of words (garxi/darxi, debji/degji,
> nazdi/nazbi etc), and *might* also be the cause of my confusion
between
> stops and fricatives (*amji/*amfi, *erfa/*erpa etc); although I
suspect
> some problem in the voicing of the speakers' fricatives in the latter
> case.

Seconded.

> Indeed, as always seen in the purest english accents, the
> recording demonstrates obvious english voicing problems.

Au contraire, mon capitain! A clipped British English pronounciation
would, IMHO, greatly help, it's that awful hot-potatoe-in-mouth American
accent that is the problem here, at least for me ;-)

> But that's not the main point. Unless I am completely wrong, the
> worst of all is my understanding of "jum" where "jam" was intended,
and
> the many mistakes I had to consciously correct involving possible j/c,
f/v
> and more generally voicing of consonants.

I didn't have the "jum" vs. "jam" problem, but completely agree with the
voicing issue: voicig is important in lojban, and was rather neglected
in the samples.

> It looks like english speakers are shy about sharping their vowels and
> voicing their fricatives!! I really do not know how to express that
> exactly, but I feel like it is an unconscious reflex of the english
mouth,
> too, to "round" vowels and make them sink into another at the end of
the
> voicing (which is thus made worse when the vowel follow a voiced
fricative
> and precedes a voiced consonant, for example, as in the "jam" case.)

Tensing the vowels is absolutely crucial to lojban, IMHO. Seems like Bob
didn't follow his own advice of always smiling while speaking lojban in
the samples... ;-) As a native German, I think I have less problems with
the fricatives (German sure has enough of those...) but I tend to let my
vowels relax to "y", especially where this is common in German, i.e.
unstressed vowels at the end of words, which unfortunately is a rather
wide-spread thing in lojban. :-(

<snip>
> I decided to work on making some lojban sound samples
> made with another accent than english (in my case, it will be french).
I
> think it would be a good idea if other people speaking natively other
> languages could record some samples as well; if needed, as my ISP
allows
> us a fairly large storage space on personal web sites, I could set up
a
> sound records resource page.

I'll se what I can do, If I get around to doing it, the Aesop fable will
be first. (See below)

> You can find the first recordings at
> http://grey.havens.free.fr/lojban/sound-records/

I had a "hear" at those and found them generally better than the files
on helsinki. The "le tanxe" sentence was great, and so was the lojcons
re-recording. I did have some problems with the "le lorxu" file, though.
You consistently speak "'" as ",". Or that's what I hear it as, at
least. Examples:
ku'o -> ku,o
gi'e -> gi,e
lego'i -> lego,i
etc.

This may be due to loss in the compression, or due to your being a
native french speaker (and french not having an "h"). I'll see what I
can do about a "German" version for comparison...

Bye,
--
Daniel "Gudy" Gudlat
[email-masked]

No one pays me enough to speak for them, so I only speak for myself.