Return-Path: Received: by snark.thyrsus.com (/\==/\ Smail3.1.21.1 #21.19) id ; Sat, 8 Feb 92 03:28 EST Received: by cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (5.57/UUCP-Project/Commodore 2/8/91) id AA19022; Fri, 7 Feb 92 22:25:18 EST Received: from cunixf.cc.columbia.edu by relay2.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA27061; Fri, 7 Feb 92 21:14:35 -0500 Received: from cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu by cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (5.59/FCB) id AA11067; Fri, 7 Feb 92 21:10:29 EST Message-Id: <9202080210.AA11067@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.1) with BSMTP id 6937; Fri, 07 Feb 92 21:09:01 EST Received: by CUVMB (Mailer R2.07) id 7833; Fri, 07 Feb 92 21:08:44 EST Date: Fri, 7 Feb 1992 17:50:27 -0500 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Slavic vowels/ response to Ivan X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Sat Feb 8 03:28:21 1992 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN Ivan Derzhanski says: >Still, I have to declare, on behalf of the entire body of Slavic- >tongued people, that while we have some sympathy for those who have >trouble pronouncing word-initial /ml/ (a cluster we take for granted), >we will have to undergo some special training to learn to distinguish >/I/ from /i/. I personally can't tell them apart, all my linguistic >training nonwithstanding. I've never been a master of IPA symbols, or Cyrillic, or their ASCII representation. There is a Cyrillic letter that looks like a backwards N, and another that looks like the two lower-case letters "bi" written close together. Is there no phonemic distinction between the sounds for these two letters? If I am correct as to what these sound like, if I were speaking to you in Lojban, I would try to use the former for my Lojban 'i' and the latter would probably come fairly close to my buffer. Are we misusing our terms for describing these two Lojban sounds? Any suggestions on how we can be clearer? Note that the definition of the buffer is that it has to be distinguishable or filterable to/by the listener. It would be 'bad form' for me talking to a Slavic speaker to use two sounds not distinguishable. On the other hand, Lojban has a relatively small number of vowel phonemes, and most people can distinguish some phones that have no true phonemic distinction for them. I find it hard to believe that a speaker of a buffered dialect will have trouble finding a sound in his inventory of unique phones that a given listener cannot distinguish. This is one reason for keeping the buffer sound undefined. If my listener cannot understand me, I am forced to choose another sound, and by maximizing the distance between vowel phonemes, we leave a fair amount of room between them to squeeze in another somewhere that works pragmatically. The buffer is after all designed to recognize and solve a pragmatic problem for communciation between non-native speakers. Presumably a native Lojban speaker would NOT speak a buffered dialect. lojbab