Return-Path: Received: by marob.masa.com (/\=-/\ Smail3.1.18.1 #18.7) id ; Thu, 26 Apr 90 23:40 EDT Received: by hombre.MASA.COM (smail2.5) id AA07346; 26 Apr 90 05:50:01 EST (Thu) Received: from cbmvax.UUCP by rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.3/3.05) with UUCP id AA25785; Wed, 25 Apr 90 07:41:04 EDT Received: by cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (5.57/UUCP-Project/Commodore Jan 13 1990) id AA03099; Wed, 25 Apr 90 06:14:24 EDT Received: from snark.UUCP by vu-vlsi.Villanova.EDU (4.1/SMI-4.0) id AA21072; Wed, 25 Apr 90 05:44:01 EDT Received: by snark.uu.net (smail2.3) id AA09753; 25 Apr 90 02:02:55 EDT (Wed) Received: from RUTGERS.EDU by uunet.uu.net (5.61/1.14) with SMTP id AA11346; Tue, 24 Apr 90 20:28:03 -0400 Received: from phri.UUCP by rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.3/3.05) with UUCP id AA01207; Tue, 24 Apr 90 16:44:36 EDT Received: by phri.UUCP (smail2.5) id AA00724; 24 Apr 90 14:56:42 EST (Tue) Received: by marob.masa.com (/\=-/\ Smail3.1.18.1 #18.7) id ; Tue, 24 Apr 90 15:26 EDT Message-Id: From: marob.masa.com!cowan (John Cowan) Subject: Tidbits To: snark.uu.net!lojban-list Date: Tue, 24 Apr 90 15:26:24 EDT X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.2 PL16] Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Thu Apr 26 23:40:53 1990 X-From-Space-Address: hombre!marob.masa.com!cowan Herewith a few tidbits that may interest Lojbanists. -------- In describing Lojban to a group of friends, I mentioned as a virtue the default tenselessness of Lojban sentences. An English-speaker and an English/Spanish-speaker both expressed puzzlement: "Why would you want to say something without mentioning tense?" Rather than replying directly, I chose to describe a little bit about the Navajo language. I don't know Navajo, so what I say here is subject to correction. In Navajo, it is necessary to mention all sorts of things that English finds unnecessary to specify. The sentence "You eat blueberries", for example, must be rendered as "You [pl.] eat separable objects one at a time." The vagueness of English about singular/plural in the case of "you" is impossible to render in Navajo, as is the vagueness of "eat". The Navajo fence-rider cannot simply report "Fence broken"; he must mention whether the breakage appeared to be accidental, deliberate, or the result of an animal's act. Likewise it is impossible to say "They went thataway!" in Navajo. The direction of motion must be nailed down, as must the mode of travel, as must the distinction between going >to< a place and going >toward< a place, or going to a place and passing it on the way to another place, etc. etc. etc. By comparison, English is downright sloppy. The Navajo-speaker's reaction to English is "How can I know what the >belagana< are talking about?" From within English itself, this sloppiness seems more like a freedom. It is not necessary to pin down all these details to make a grammatical English sentence. Lojban, although it can be as precise as Navajo, can also be even vaguer than English, leaving even the details English thinks are fundamental unspecified. This gives Lojban an additional range of expressiveness not present in any natural language. -------- It seems there has been much dispute recently about the ' character, which the Lojban materials say is pronounced like the English h. "Why not use the letter h, then?" In JL10, lojbab gives a number of reasons for not using a letter. It seems to me that confusion might be avoided by explaining the role of the buffer sound differently. (I have checked this with lojbab.) Consider the word "co'o". An English-based view of this would be that it contains four sounds, "c", "o", an h-like sound, and another "o". This is also the view of the current Lojban material. Another view, however, says that the four sounds are "c", a standard "o", an >unvoiced< "o", and then another standard "o". In other words, the two "o" sounds are separated by an interval of time when sound is being produced, the vocal tract is in the position for "o", but voicing has been "turned off". In the sequence "o'o", the three sounds are separated only by boundaries between voicing and non-voicing. What about words where the ' separates two distinct vowels, for example, "ko'a"? In this case, there is the same pattern of voiced vowel + unvoiced vowel + voiced vowel; the unvoiced vowel may be either "a"-like or "o"-like -- I myself tend to make it "a"-like. This makes for a nice symmetry between . and '. . signifies a period of no sound production at all -- voicing turned off, exhaling turned off. During ', voicing is turned off but exhaling continues, producing a voiceless vowel. Exactly which voiceless vowel does not matter, since Lojban does not distinguish between the different possibilities. Note: I am not proposing that this long-winded explanation replace the basic instruction to beginners of "Pronounce an 'h'"! It is merely available in reserve, to be trotted out when the student asks "If it sounds like an 'h', why not use the letter 'h'"? Then you can reply, "It's not >really< an h-sound at all, it's a voiceless vowel."