From lojbab@GREBYN.COM Ukn Jul 29 23:56:41 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Thu, 29 Jul 1993 23:56:40 -0400 Received: from YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 1225; Thu, 29 Jul 93 23:55:28 EDT Received: from YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU (NJE origin LISTSERV@YALEVM) by YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU (LMail V1.1d/1.7f) with BSMTP id 6167; Thu, 29 Jul 1993 23:55:27 -0400 Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1993 23:54:38 EDT Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: logban ' X-To: conlang@diku.dk X-Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: Message-ID: The main reason for not transscribing apostrophe as "h" is NOT that it is not equivalent to "h", which is true but a less important point. The important feature about apostrophe is that it doesn't look like a normal alphanbetic character in Lojban, and it is not. Regardless of the formal phonetics, in Lojban ' is NOT a consonant. Nor is it a vowel. It is a pronunciation guide that says devoice the glide between these two vowels when you pronounce them as two syllables. It is contrasted against the close-comma which means the same thing but without devoicing, with the period which means not glide, but a full (or glottal) stop, and with null, which means only one syllable. Thus all of the possible ways to divide the word do not appear as alphabetic characters, and the most significant contrast - between the common ' and the uncommon , are particularly evident and easy to learn. Secondly, the Lojban morphology is structured around certain patterns of letters and is dependent on whether they are consosnants or vowels - as defined for the Lojban character set. Ignoring ' , and . as "non-characters" all cmavo are V VV CV or CVV. All gismu are CVCCV or CCVCV. All lujvo are broken down into units of non-final CVV(r/n) CVC(y) CCV CVCCy CCVCy and final CVV CCV CCVCV CVCCV. All names end in consonants, and le'avla are most anything else. Being able to decide that a word is not one of the first couple of types, and therefore a le'avla, depends partly on being able to quickly recognizing the breakdown of lujvo into 3 and 5 letter segments, with the r/n/y hyphens at appropriate places. Throw in an insignificant "h" and those patterns become harder to see, and much harder to learn. Given that, for example. Frank S. has said that he finds breaking lujvo up into pieces difficult, he may need to concentrate on learning and looking for the patterns, at which point the apostrophe will be seen as more valuable. Notwithstanding this, the "h" is recognized as an alternate to apostrophe as part of a larger system of alternate orthography that is used to make the language look more similar to other forms of Loglan. People who are writing in that alternate orthography are welcome to use the "h", and we will probably come up with computerized routines sometime that will translate between this standard alternate and the official orthography so that the rest of us can read the text easily. (I find it difficult to read text with the "h" in EXCEPT when it is a lower case h in all capitals, as it is in the standard names of the selma'o (word categories), which could not use ' because of the limitations of YACC (a unix-related computer program) and hence uses the lower- case "h" instead. lojbab