Re: [bpfk] official cmavo form

[John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>]

And Rosta scripsit:

> [w] is merely a necessarily-short subvariety of [u], and Lojban should not
> be making phonological contrasts based on segment duration, because such
> contrasts are not phonetically robust.

Tell that to the Hungarians!  Oh, wait ....

(Seriously, vowel length is reconstructible to Proto-Finno-Ugric, though
conventionally not to Proto-Uralic.)

> That is, it's a bad idea for
> [tuitsku] to be ambiguous between /tu witsku/ and /twitsku/, and that
> ambiguity should be remedied and nullified by forbidding one of them. 

The current prescription forbids both of them:  "tuitsku" has the illicit
CgV form, and "tu uitsku" has be [tu?witsku].  I'm good with this.
Lojban's phonotactics are as arbitrary as every other feature of the
language, and I see no need to liberalize them.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
I Hope, Sir, that we are not mutually Un-friended by this Difference
which hath happened betwixt us.
     --Thomas Fuller, Appeal of Injured Innocence (1659)

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