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Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:07:54 -0500
From: Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>
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To:  lojban-beginners@lojban.org
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: cmevla-final apostrophe
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Alex Martini wrote:
> If anyone could comment on why y'y was made special when Lojban was  
> being defined, that'd be great.

In the original version of Loglan, JCB did not include y'y.  There were 
the 4 main diphthongs which correspond to Lojban's ai, au, ei, oi.   In 
VV cmavo, there were also ia, ie, ii, io, iu and ua, ue, ui, uo, and uu 
Other combinations were always pronounced as two syllables with a glide, 
so that "koa" would be pronounced as ko,ua.  Except in the VV cmavo, the 
10 special VV diphthongs were allowed to be pronounced as either glided 
disyllables or as monosyllables - JCB pronounced "lui" as "lwi" in the 
French manner.  But he also allowed for it to be pronounced as lu,wi.

(Note that JCB defined the "close-comma" which I just used, as a means 
of showing mandatory syllabification, primarily in names. He also used 
the period for a mandatory pause)

The obvious problem is that it was ambiguous how many syllables there 
were in a word.  But as long as the optional diphthongs only appeared in 
cmavo and in cmevla, it didn't matter that much.  But in the revision of 
the language in 1982 that created the decomposable lujvo that are used 
in Lojban, all of a sudden there was a problem.  How do you pronounce 
"brului"? /BRU,lwi/ or /bru,LU,wi/.  Because Loglan didn't have many 
speakers, and because it collapsed as a community very shortly after 
that revision, JCB never really understood how much problem this could 
cause different speakers attempting to understand the speech stream.

When we redesigned Lojban from scratch, we added the apostrophe to the 
close-comma and the period as a third form to force a syllable 
separation.  The period is a pause or glottal stop, the close-comma is a 
voiced glide, and the apostrophe (visually, a high close-comma) is an 
unvoiced glide.  We pointed out that the unvoiced glide, as spoken by 
English speakers, usually sounded like an "h", but we told people that 
they could pronounce it as any non-Lojban unvoiced consonant.  One of 
our first students, as a joke, always spoke the "lisp dialect" of 
Lojban, using unvoiced "th" to pronounce the apostrophe.

Unfortunately, the conventions of the C programming language and of the 
parser tool YACC that was used in our grammar development, did not allow 
apostrophes in words.  Thus we were forced to make selma'o names that 
had "h" in them (like KOhA) for use in YACC.  This more strongly gave 
the idea that the apostrophe was just a funky way of writing an "h", 
when in fact it is more akin to a diacritical mark.  The apostrophe, 
like the close comma and the period, are not considered letters of the 
Lojban alphabet

lojbab