Re: [lojban-beginners] Lojban "r"

[tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com>]

On 26 August 2011 18:09, Jonathan Jones <eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:
> My point is that the "er" in "better" is pronounced comparably to the "er" in "lerfu".

Many British, Australians, etc. don't pronounce the "r" in "better" or
"hard" as the phoneme /r/. I myself as a non-native has adopted that
non-rhotic accent. For us, "better" is /bɛt.ə/, "hard" is /hɑːd/.


On 26 August 2011 18:29, Jonathan Jones <eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:
> The Lojban sound-cluster that sounds like the English "air" is {eir}, not {er}.

  "air"
  /ɛə/ (UK)
  /ɛɹ/ (US)

  http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/air#English

That would be Lojbanized as {ey} or {er}.


> .ebu is pronounced as the "e" in "b_e_tt_e_r", ""w_e_t", "p_e_st", etc.

I know no modern native English accent in which the second "e" in
"better" is pronounced like the first one, like the Lojban /e/.


On 26 August 2011 21:37, Jonathan Jones <eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:
> All Lojban vowels are always pronounced the same way they are in the Romance
> languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Latin....), or, I recently learned, the
> same way they are pronounced in Japanese (which is the same as the Romance
> languages).

Doesn't have to be Romance. Among the Europeans, the Germanic (German,
Swedish...), the Slavic (Russian, Polish...), and the Uralic (Finnish,
Hungarian...), too, have pure vowels that Lojban and not English has.

The Japanese /u/ is unrounded, [ɯ], and there is no [ɯ] in those
Romance languages above, nor in Lojban.

In terms of the amount of vowels, Japanese is pretty much the same as
Spanish but hardly French or Italian.

(If we could add [ɯ] to the Lojban /u/, thus allowing the vowel to be
pronounced with different roundedness, we could by the same logic also
have rounded /i/ and /e/ as in French, Swedish, Finnish, etc.)


On 27 August 2011 02:50, Jonathan Jones <eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:
> Then I would have a problem distinguishing which is being said outside of
> context, as unless {cirlrfu} and {cirlerfu} have different emphasis, they
> sound the same to me- at least when I say them.

For people with certain first languages such as Japanese and Koreans,
the problem would be the difference between not so much "lr" and "ler"
as "l" and "r". I come across cases where they confuse these
consonants in writing or speech and in English (e.g. "grand" vs
"gland") or Esperanto (e.g. "granda" vs "glanda") or Lojban (e.g.
"karli" vs "kalri"). (Hence the term "Engrish".) For them, "-rlr-" is
bound to be extremely challenging. (And many Polynesian languages have
no consonant cluster at all.) Fortunately or unfortunately, Lojban
allows a nonce buffer vowel between consonant clusters, so they might
be helped by pronunciations like "-r[@]l[@]r[@]-" where "@" would
represent any vowel other than the prescribed six, but that would also
for some other people make more difficult telling "ler" from "l[@]r".


On 27 August 2011 05:48, Jonathan Jones <eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't like the trilling. It sounds wrong as an ending sound, and it makes
> it much harder to hear the important bit - the difference between your "e"
> and your "ei".

From my subjective viewpoint, [er] [eɾ] [eʁ] are easier to hear than
[eɹ]. [ɹ] sounds to me the most vowel-ish among them and tends to
blend into the surrounding vowel rather than cutting it out. If I
wanted to make a clearer distinction between "e" and "ei" in speech by
/r/, I would use [r] or [ʁ].


> In any case, your "r" is my "er", and your "er" and "eir" are my "eir".

"relererelerfu" becomes "ereleireireleirfu"?


mu'o

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