From cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN Fri Jan 31 09:55:05 1992 Return-Path: Received: by snark.thyrsus.com (/\==/\ Smail3.1.21.1 #21.19) id ; Fri, 31 Jan 92 09:54 EST Received: by cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (5.57/UUCP-Project/Commodore 2/8/91) id AA04802; Fri, 31 Jan 92 09:31:44 EST Received: from cunixf.cc.columbia.edu by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA05865; Fri, 31 Jan 92 09:28:39 -0500 Received: from cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu by cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (5.59/FCB) id AA25304; Fri, 31 Jan 92 09:26:42 EST Message-Id: <9201311426.AA25304@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.1) with BSMTP id 3342; Fri, 31 Jan 92 09:23:41 EST Received: by CUVMB (Mailer R2.07) id 6174; Fri, 31 Jan 92 09:23:28 EST Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1992 06:07:06 -0500 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: allophones of zero X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann Status: RO By way of history, the choice of hyphen, and the development of hyphen/buffer involved a fair amount of testing, allbeit only with English speakers. The original favored approach involved using vocalic 'r' as the hyphen, but I believe that a significant minority thought this ugly especially in print. The 'r' approach WAS retained after CVV rafsi at beginnings, and I used it later in le'avla systmeatization. The vocalic 'r' to some people is the closest vowel sound to [y], of course. Instead people chose y=@ as preferred. This caused other problems, including the fact that JCB at that time planned to use @ as the buffer. Basically, all the people who wanted to speak the language overruled 'simple' design. JCB tried and failed to satisfy people using the @ for both hypen and buffer. I was one of the opponents, and in the only contribution to the Loglan that JCB acknowl- ledges, I proposed that speakers of buffered dialects would use 'iy' (yuh) for the hyphen, and speakers of unbuffered dialects would use 'uh'. I believe that remains TLI design to the present. On the other hand, at the gathering where we first put together the phonology for Lojban, and at LogFests before and after, someone, I believe it was Jack Waugh, convinced me-and-others that there would be a lot of people that would speak half-buffoered dialects: they would use buffers between some small number of cluster (in Jack's case ml and mr initial, and paired stops as medials) but unbuffered otherwise. It was also easily demonstarted that such hyphenation was close to subliminal, but that the lax sound in such clusters was so short a as to be unidentifiable, even though Jack thought he was saying an @ when he concentrated. Since at the same time, we also realized that lujvo with hyphenation was going to be much more common than conscious buffering, we designed Lojban to de-emphasize the ambiguity question adn recognize actual usage - hyphenation was deemed more important than buffering and the buffer was decided to be some sound that would be ignored by the listener. This can therefore either be a sound whose length is so short that it is not deemed phonemic (as Jack's usually was) and hence the listener can't even if concentrating, tell what sound it is, or a sound that the speaker explicitly used and chose to be out of normal phoneme space. Experiments with'real listeners' showed that a short sound like the 'i' of "bit" was successful with English speakers, but we did not want to make this mandatory, since some others might find it hard to distinguish. We considered [y], but found it too hard to say as English speakers (not that we buffered that much), but on the other hand we figured that we could use it well-enough if talking to a listener who couldn't tell what we were saying using an 'I' buffer. We haven't talked about it, but it is plausible that we could accept the reverse of the JCB plan and use [iy] diphthong as a buffer. H,mmm. Actually, I think we did - it sounds hilariously strange. As strange as the guy who, back when we defined the apostrophe as any non-Lojban unvoiced consonant, chose 'th' instead of 'h' making everything he said sound like a lisp. The experimentation with live conversation showed that the current approach was most viable, and easiest to do instinctively, but that we could, faced with a listener who could not distinguish our speech clearly, make alterations and with conscious emphasis on the buffer sound, make it virtually any sound nbeeded to make it disntict to the listener. Hence the current design 5that it merely be different from the base sounds. I have continued to find that the barred I is most teachable, and we have real conversation that does not hinge on noticing buffers. Only when we get a speaker with a real problem saying or listeneing to Lojban speech with the current design, will we have a conclusive test. There is no sentiment among the design team to even consider a chnage until such a speaker shows up and is interacted with for a while. The strong sentiment in the Lojban community for stability in baselines makes any discussion of phonology changes beyond stylistic ones in how we teach the language academic. lojbab