From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Wed Sep 21 21:43:30 2005 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Wed, 21 Sep 2005 21:43:30 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.52) id 1EIIvi-0000xf-9T for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Wed, 21 Sep 2005 21:43:30 -0700 Received: from ms-smtp-05.texas.rr.com ([24.93.47.44] helo=ms-smtp-05-eri0.texas.rr.com) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.52) id 1EIIvf-0000xX-Fe for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Wed, 21 Sep 2005 21:43:30 -0700 Received: from hypermetrics.com (cpe-66-68-164-156.austin.res.rr.com [66.68.164.156]) by ms-smtp-05-eri0.texas.rr.com (8.12.10/8.12.7) with ESMTP id j8M4hOB2022730 for ; Wed, 21 Sep 2005 23:43:24 -0500 (CDT) Message-ID: <4332366C.2040704@hypermetrics.com> Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 23:43:24 -0500 From: Hal Fulton User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.1) Gecko/20031114 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Just got my speakers back online... Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Virus-Scanned: Symantec AntiVirus Scan Engine X-Spam-Score: -2.6 (--) X-archive-position: 2231 X-Approved-By: hal9000@hypermetrics.com X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-original-sender: hal9000@hypermetrics.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners So naturally one of the first things I did was go hear the podcast. :) I have no real complaints with the pronunciation. I think Matt's accent is fairly neutral -- believe me, I have heard all kinds of accents in the USA that are far heavier. I *thought* that he pronounced {gismu} a little off -- perhaps with an English short i, but I wasn't sure. I had a minor nit with {detri}, mostly because of a high school speech teacher I had who was perhaps a little overzealous. It took me a while to get what she was arguing, but in the end I was convinced. Most people I've mentioned it to are not convinced, so I won't be offended if you tell me I'm crazy. Say something like "tuck" to yourself. Notice how you manipulate your tongue on the t -- its initial position and its motion. In my case, it starts out hovering on that fleshy ridge behind the teeth, then it flicks away. Now say "truck" (as many/most Americans do). When I am not being careful, it's completely different. My tongue is curled backward, so that the tip is much farther back (perhaps almost an inch?). The tongue is pressed harder against the roof of the mouth, so that it makes much more contact in terms of surface area. Then the motion is a little slower because of the starting point and the curled state of the tongue. In short, the word "trot" we might render in Lojban as {trat} -- say it's a cmene or something. :) But what I/we really say is more like {tcrat}. When you say "trick" -- is the initial sound more like the beginning of "tick" or the beginning of "chick"? For many people, it's the latter. When I pronounce Lojban (which is only between me and the cat so far), I try to be more precise than I usually would in English. So I would pronounce {detri} less like {detcri} and more like I imagine my old Kuwaiti roommate would have done. My speech teacher was especially annoyed when a terminal t was followed by an initial y ("Don't you want to come?") and we would carelessly pronounce it something like "Doan chew want to come?" ("Stop 'chew'-ing," she would say.) Well, enough on that. Getting back to the podcast -- yes, I liked it a lot. Well done, and keep them coming. Hal