[lojban-beginners] Re: Long consonants & long vowels

[Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com>]

I think the reason that they don't allow geminate consonants is that it would introduce some difficulty in hearing a distinction between "b" and "b:". And the LLG worked very hard to make all the lojban sounds as distinct as possible. 

As far as the long vs short vowels, I like that every letter in lojban corresponds to one and only one sound, even if it means that I can't use long "a" and "i" (the rest you can get through the vowels or diphthongs).

Correct me if I'm wrong on any of this.

 - Luke Bergen

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 4:58 AM, tijlan <pascal.akihiko@gmail.com> wrote:

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

For example:

Âmeggy ('sour cherry' in Hungarian)

Âkukka ('flower' in Finnish)

Ârappa ('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 ):

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

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

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

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

mu'o mi'e tijlan