[lojban-beginners] Re: yet more beginner questions

["Matt Arnold" <matt.mattarn@gmail.com>]

On 10/11/07, Yoav Nir <yoav.nir@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I'm new to studying lojban, and am working my way through "Lojban for
> beginners"
>
> I have a few questions already.
>
> First, is how to spell my name. I know the English spelling doesn't give a
> lot of clues (it's a Hebrew name). It's pronounced as two syllables, the
> first is like "Yo" in yonder, the second "av" as in the first syllable of
> "avril" in Spanish. I'm guessing that ioav won't cut it because of the three
> consecutive vowels, so should it be io,av. Also am I supposed to capitalize
> the second syllable (io,AV) to show where the stress is every time, or is
> that optional?

My American pronunciation of "yonder" has the lojban "a" in the first
syllable. Click the Sound Sample link to hear it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel

Lojban "o" is pronounced like this sound sample:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_back_rounded_vowel

> Second, I've read that lojban names have to end in a consonant, so if they
> don't, we add one.  My question is, do we pronounce the 's' in la meiris ?

Yes. There are no silent characters in Lojban. Lojbanization of a name
usually changes the pronunciation, not just the spelling.

> Third, I've seen that  the apostrophe is used to make an 'h' sound, whereas
> the h character is not used.  Why is that?  Why didn't the inventors of
> lojban (or does it date back to loglan?) simply use an h for the h sound?

Because they wanted it to be immediately clear that this
sound/character set served a special morphological seperating function
similar to punctuation, separating vowel pairs. It is not permissable
to use outside that function. The morphological rules give permissable
sequences of C V ' (consonant, vowel, "h" sound). Had it been an "h"
character, it would not have been immediately visible that it is
considered neither a consonant or a vowel for purposes of the rules.

> That's it for now.  I'm sure I'll have more questions as I go on.
>
> mi'e io,AV
>

Thanks for your questions! Keep them coming.

-Eppcott