From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Thu Sep 22 07:50:21 2005 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Thu, 22 Sep 2005 07:50:21 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.52) id 1EISOy-0002nD-PL for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Thu, 22 Sep 2005 07:50:20 -0700 Received: from zproxy.gmail.com ([64.233.162.206]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.52) id 1EISOn-0002n4-A9 for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Thu, 22 Sep 2005 07:50:20 -0700 Received: by zproxy.gmail.com with SMTP id n29so6262nzf for ; Thu, 22 Sep 2005 07:50:08 -0700 (PDT) DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:from:reply-to:to:subject:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; b=TKLdyLNuhpG+Xwhom7fEZeq9i+1VWma3zy2u6FrFIjeZPDNrh7AMuL64LadWksa5AxdshK7H7o0scFvM805EsgMZhIlwwM3ao7Av8fR+5BCGj+WhRG2PxUgZkI+fe/ii73RPFDR/ZDp1FMN1u5L7l5bGNh3vWTxIZifkjQe800Y= Received: by 10.36.55.2 with SMTP id d2mr6062648nza; Thu, 22 Sep 2005 07:50:08 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.36.61.18 with HTTP; Thu, 22 Sep 2005 07:50:08 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <737b61f305092207507992359e@mail.gmail.com> Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 09:50:08 -0500 From: Chris Capel To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Just got my speakers back online... In-Reply-To: <4332366C.2040704@hypermetrics.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by Ecartis Content-Disposition: inline References: <4332366C.2040704@hypermetrics.com> X-Spam-Score: -2.5 (--) X-archive-position: 2242 X-Approved-By: pdf23ds@gmail.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: pdf23ds@gmail.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners On 9/21/05, Hal Fulton wrote: > 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. Convinced of what? That people pronounce consonants differently when they're next to certain other consonants? Or that such a thing is imprecise and incorrect? Linguists call these other sounds allophones*. We perceive different sounds as being the same phoneme, i.e. the same consonant/vowel. To say that this sort of thing is either incorrect or even less than ideal is just silly. Your old teacher was a victim of knowing just enough about something to be dangerous but not enough to be right. When one deals with teaching correct usage to dozens of children every day, one can lose grasp on which features of the language are common, or even universal, in standard usage. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophones However, you're right to be more careful about these combinations in Lojban, as different languages recognize different groups of phonemes as being allophones, and thus "trat" and "tcrat" (in lojbanic orthography) might be recognized as two different words. On the other hand, I believe there are several groups of allphones that are common to many languages, being natural progressions in the evolution of pronunciation. (I'm not quite sure what those are.) Some of this can be helped by using a different sound for some consonants that appear in a lot of English allophones. I use a flapped 'r', as in Spanish, for many lojban 'r's. I do have difficulty if the 'r' is after an 'n' or an 'l', though. Spanish itself has those consonant combinations, though, so maybe native speakers use a different, allophonic phoneme for those combinations and I just never really noticed. Or maybe they just speak Spanish better than me. :-( Chris Capel -- "What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?" -- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)