X-Digest-Num: 58 Message-ID: <44114.58.226.959273824@eGroups.com> Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 09:51:39 -0800 From: Ivan A Derzhanski Subject: Re: Accent X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 226 Content-Length: 1906 Lines: 44 Robin Turner wrote: > la .ivan cusku di'e > > Oh, there is no shortage of languages with a single /l / r/ > > phoneme [...]. Apart from Mandarin, [...] > > For once I think I've caught Ivan out! Fie, fie, Robin! Caught me out? You should not even dream of doing such a thing. > Although Mandarin doesn't have exactly the same /l/r/ sounds > as English, there's still a distinction e.g. "ren", "li". Yes, Mandarin does have an initial that is written as _r_ in pinyin (and as _j_ in some other romanisation systems, and as Cyrillic _zh_ in Palladius' system). Its most common realisation is, from what I've heard and read, /z./ (voiced retroflex fricative). Can one say that it is a/the Mandarin /r/ phoneme? Of course, since notations for phonemes are merely convenient labels. Does it follow that a Mandarin speaker would/should pronounce Lojban {r} as Mandarin _r_? By no means. It would be a natural choice if the closest Mandarin thing to Lojban {r} were _r_ and if the closest Lojban thing to Mandarin _r_ were {r}; but in fact the various European _r_ sounds are universally rendered as _l_ in Chinese (`Robin' _Luo2bin1_, `Rousseau' _Lu2suo1_, `Ruhr' _Lu3er3_, `Rome' _Luo2ma3_), and if I heard the _r_ of _ren2_ in Lojban speech, I reckon I would interpret it as {j} rather than {r}. (There is the `other' _r_, the one in _er_, which has nothing to do with the initial except that it happens to be written with the same letter in pinyin; but that doesn't have the distribution of a consonant, so I'm disregarding it here.) -- `Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.' (Chief Seattle) Ivan A Derzhanski H: cplx Iztok bl 91, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria W: Dept for Math Lx, Inst for Maths & CompSci, Bulg Acad of Sciences