Sid wrote:
‹ea› in Old English symbolized [æɑ], not [ea]. And the Middle English
‹ea› symbolized /ɛː/.
What I find stranger is that "eu" is not a Lojban diphthong. "eu" is
fairly
common, occurring in Spanish at least of the six. It's a diphthong
in Basque
but not Lojban, which is why "auskalerik" is so spelled.
"euskalerik" would
have an extra syllable. /eu/ does not occur in Russian (Belarusian,
but not
Russian, has diphthongs ending in /u/) or English (it turns into
/iu/). The
other three I don't know.
1. Neither ea nor eu were in Loglan, and at the time we weren't interested in making changes without a good reason.
2. Equally importantly, as Pierre noted, they are not found in modern English. Nor are they found in Chinese, or Hindi or Arabic, as far as I know. And since diphthongs don't appear in gismu anyway, expanding the list was hardly important.
3. Finally, with regard to all of the diphthongs involving u, we had noticed that they a) had a lot of variant pronunciations, and b) sometimes produced especially difficult combinations, that some would pronounce as diphthongs and others would make disyllables. (the worst of these was "ui" especially after l, r, c, or s). Since Lojban's audiovisual isomorphism is dependent on syllable counts, this would have produced (and did produce in Loglan) variants in stress depending on whether someone pronounced 1 or 2 syllables. The easiest solution was to force all questionable diphthongs to ALWAYS be disyllables, and that is how the apostrophe was born.
lojbab -- Bob LeChevalier lojbab@lojban.org www.lojban.org President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lojban Beginners" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lojban-beginners+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to lojban-beginners@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban-beginners. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.