[lojban-beginners] Long consonants & long vowels

[tijlan <pascal.akihiko@gmail.com>]

Does Lojban allow for geminate consonants (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geminate )?

For example:

 meggy ('sour cherry' in Hungarian)

 kukka ('flower' in Finnish)

 rappa ('trumpet' in Japanese)

These would traditionally be lojbanized as "meg", "kuka", and "rapa"
respectively, given that "gg", "kk", and "pp" are not permissible. But
gemination, basically pronouncing consonants long, is phonetically
different from such clusters where each consonant is pronounced
individually. Any thoughts on this?

I have a rather experimental idea. In linguistics, there is a way to
transcribe "kukka", for instance, with the IPA length sign [Ë], giving
[kukËa]. The sign is fairly similar to colon (:), which has currently
no official use in Lojban but is still covered by ASCII. So why not
lojbanizing geminate consonants with colon? The above examples would
become: "meg:", "kuk:a", "rap:a".

By the same principle, we would be able to lojbanize long vowels (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length ):

 hÃz [haËz] ("house" in Hungarian) --> xa:z

 maa [maË] ("earth" in Finnish) --> ma:

 tÅkyÅ [toËkjoË] ("Tokyo" in Japanese) --> to:kio:

 oris [oËriËs] ("mouth" in Latin) --> o:ri:s

mu'o mi'e tijlan