On Jan 16, 2008, at 9:26 AM, Vid Sintef wrote:
On Jan 16, 2008 12:57 PM, Elmo Todurov <todurov@gmail.com> wrote:Vid Sintef wrote:What is the problem of using the apostrophe, which is effectively a consonant,It is not. It's special, just like y and . and ,.Yes it is special. But nonetheless it's a consonant pronounced as either /h/ or /θ/.
Both of the above are essentially correct. y'y (the apostrophe letter) is pronounced as a consonant by most speakers. And it is a special sound in Lojban.
Let's pull out the long linguistics words now. Phonotactics: the allowed sound combinations in a given language. For example, English would allow the nonsense word "feep" and "lek", but not "pferd" or "rmla". As a speaker of English, the rules for allowed sounds and clusters etc is subconscious.
In Lojban, these rules are actually written out. The y'y is only allowed *between vowels*. This is part of the phonotactics of Lojban. There are other things, such as disallowed consonant pairs as well. (I think "sv" is an example). Sure it might be useful to have y'y in other places, but we can't because of how Lojban is defined. I should try to dig up where in CLL the phonotactic rules are set out. I'd guess in the chapter titled "The Hills are Alive with the Sounds of Lojban"...
Going back to English, think of the 'h' and 'ng' sounds. The 'h' can't come anywhere but the start of a syllable, and almost always the start of a word. And opposite for 'ng' -- only the end of a syllable. Why can't you have words pronounced like like "nga" or "mih" in English? Because the phonotactics don't allow it. So it's not really that strange that Lojban has sounds which are only allowed in certain positions either.
If anyone could comment on why y'y was made special when Lojban was being defined, that'd be great.
mu'o mi'e .aleks.