On Friday, December 19, 2014 3:54:03 PM UTC-5, Alex Burka wrote:
What makes {ii} and {uu} any worse than other glides?
In a nutshell, they're trickier. With all other Lojban diphthongs,
the speaker is free to pronounce /i/ and /u/ as either semivowels or
approximants at his/her discretion. However, a semivowel pronunciation
of the initial glide in /ii/ and /uu/ would, by definition, merely
result in /i:/ and /u:/ (slightly longer vowels). To avoid a long-vowel realization, therefore, /i/ and /u/ glides must be heightened to approximants-bordering-on-fricatives in those positions and only in those
positions. This is bad for /u/, because fricativizing the /u/-glide
will make it sound much like /v/. Not many natural languages have a
/w/-/v/ distinction to begin with, and the needless presence of /uu/ in
the language makes that distinction tougher. The speaker has to
pronounce a glide rather precisely in those positions to maintain proper
contrastiveness. Likewise, the first /i/ in /ii/ will be prone to be
pronounced as a fricative or even an affricate by some speakers with certain L1s. Thus
/i/ can be confused with /dj/.
It's natural for languages to either fortify or eliminate glides in sequences like /ii/ and /uu/. Glides sometimes get fortified as a matter of course. When some Spanish speakers say "yo" in their language I hear "Joe", even though they aren't really using the English J-sound, and Swedes do something similar with their "j". On the other hand, I have heard at least one English speaker pronounce "yeast" exactly like "east", removing the glide. In light of such examples, IMHO it would be far more sensible to remove /ii/ and /uu/, allowing /i/ and /u/ to remain _vowels_ or _semivowels_ in all positions, and also allowing diphthongs to be "drawled" into two syllables by speakers who have trouble with them.
I was unaware of previous suggestions to remove them (since I am relatively jbocitno) but I wouldn't be so quick to call "dropping the gavel" to remove two very common attitudinals harmless!
Those two words could (and given reality probably must) remain as exceptions to the proposed new rule.
On Friday, December 19, 2014 4:22:22 PM UTC-5, xorxes wrote:
On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 5:34 PM,
<mai...@gmail.com> wrote:
My
vote comes with the qualification that the special GV cases /ii/ and
/uu/ be made illegal (as others have suggested). With all respect, it
strikes me as perverse to be seriously considering whacking harmless
syllables like /miu/ and /kua/ from cmevla when sequences like /lei/,
/leii/, /leiii/ and /leiiii/ are all legal and contrastive, as are
presumably /u'u/, /uu'u/, /u'uu/, etc.
"leiii"
and "u'uu" are not legal by camxes, which does not allow a glide after a
diphthong (so "lei,ii" is out) and does not allow a glide after the
apostrophe (so "u'uu" is out),
"lei", "le,ii" and "le,ii,ii" contrast in number of syllables.
Then the situation is better than what I described. But the distinction between "lei" and "le,ii" is still gratuitous IMHO. Wouldn't it be better to allow these two to be variants of {lei}?
I would also
advocate the following:
- forbid GV in fu'ivla/ma'ovla except after /./ (word-initially). The pronunciation of disyllabic /ia/ and that of /i'a/ are too close.
Would
it be more distinct word-initially than in other positions? It seems
that .i,avla vs .i'avla are as distinct/undistinct as mi,avla vs
mi'avla.
mu'o mi'e xorxes
That's true, but there's no choice but to allow the contrast in that position given all the existing words, especially ma'ovla, starting with /.GV/. Despite that, it still may be wise to disallow GV in non-cmevla wherever it can be disallowed. IIRC La Mukti's impact report seems to show the new rule can be applied with a small but not a huge impact on the existing lexicon. Just my two cents.