[lojban-beginners] Re: Pronunciation: a major problem in spreading lojban

[Dmitry Shintyakov <shintyakov@gmail.com>]

2009/6/1 Leonardo Castro <leolucas1980@gmail.com>

Hi, folks!

I wonder why the patterns of basic lojban words were not chosen to be
"CVVCV" and "CVCVV" instead of "CCVCV" and "CVCCV" (I would also add
"CVNCV" and "CVVV" to the list).

Anglophones are relatively well accustomed to consonant clusters, but

 

In my opinion, an auxlang should be no more complicated than Toki Pona:

a'u Everybody cares about Japanese sou much. Let them judge for themselves.

I would note that Japanese pays its price for having such a simple phonetics: tremendous amount of allophones in one part of vocabulary (especially e.g. kango), and long words in another part.

Also, I think that languages (almost) without consonant clusters are rather rare. The only famous examples I know, are Japanese and Chinese (are there any examples in Europe?). But, as I can judge from my experience with native Chinese speakers, the most serious problem for them is not consonant clusters, but voiced consonants, like b, d, g. The students from China, learning here, in Russia, are getting to pronounce consonant clusters quite fast, but even those of them who speak almost fluent, pronounce voiced consonants incorrectly.

Also, Lojban is not an auxlang, and simplicity was not its main goal.