From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Tue Jun 20 16:39:24 2006 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Tue, 20 Jun 2006 16:39:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1Fspoa-0006r8-6P for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Tue, 20 Jun 2006 16:39:24 -0700 Received: from nf-out-0910.google.com ([64.233.182.186]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1FspoX-0006r1-MR for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Tue, 20 Jun 2006 16:39:23 -0700 Received: by nf-out-0910.google.com with SMTP id x37so18936nfc for ; Tue, 20 Jun 2006 16:39:22 -0700 (PDT) DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition; b=V7j5/UwsVA/9+CCabjQ++uel7K6MLiSA6PbIzpyycDcxDeU0zhCFP0I/BKMKqwwoDvoHeVX6bIU+5eBnf97gaD6Mjaqkiz16OBldWnDNlC4zLGl6d4o+C4xRdJCmlCMzg3oBFkIgrSvcmenJLl42qLP8fDZH8IYokVygFlIGx/o= Received: by 10.49.35.3 with SMTP id n3mr6036250nfj; Tue, 20 Jun 2006 16:39:22 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.49.92.1 with HTTP; Tue, 20 Jun 2006 16:39:22 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <737b61f30606201639hd76d9a5nf95ab0afc2a75e8a@mail.gmail.com> Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2006 18:39:22 -0500 From: "Chris Capel" To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] pronunciation MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by Ecartis Content-Disposition: inline X-Spam-Score: -2.5 (--) X-archive-position: 3280 X-Approved-By: pdf23ds@gmail.com X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: pdf23ds@gmail.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners On 5/31/06, Jorge Llambías wrote: > I'm not sure stress will be the worst thing to worry Japanese speakers > though, given the consonant clusters Lojban has. Lojban was not designed > to be particularly easy to pronounce. When I was in grade school, it took me a week or two of speech therapy to learn to pronounce the American "r" sound. Several years ago, it took me (an American) about a year to really learn to easily pronounce a Spanish "r". (A trill between the tip of the tongue and the back of the front teeth.) A few months ago, it took me about two days to learn the French "r", which is a uvular trill. (I'm not sure if the uvula is actually flapping around, or what.) It could be that the latter is easier to learn, or maybe I'm just better at producing strange sounds nowadays. Do native Japanese and Chinese speakers learning to produce the "l" sound always have a lot of trouble? Is there some technique that can help them to consistently learn it? Are there any consonant clusters in Lojban that commonly give English speakers trouble? It always surprised me that Lojban had two different liquids ("l" and "r"), given that they're so close and that some languages (IIRC, including Japanese) make all liquid sounds allophones. I wonder whether some other consonant would have been better. Now, Lojban's "r" can be pronunced as an alveolar flap or trill, or a uvular trill or frictive, (or a few other things that I can't decipher the ASCII IPA for,) which probably makes it somewhat easier to understand for Japanese native speakers. 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)