Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Questions on the sounds chosen for Lojban

[tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com>]

On 21 January 2011 06:41, Greendogo <pcm1123@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was wondering what criteria was chosen for the sounds used in
> Lojban.

They might have done some statistical analysis similar to this:
http://www.eskimo.com/~ram/segmental_phonemes.png
http://www.eskimo.com/~ram/phonology.html


> For instance, why was the German sound used for "x" used, but the
> sounds [th]ink, [th]e, b[a]t, and b[i]t were not?

[x] is more common than [θ] among branches of major language families.
This might be the reason. But, as the above page shows, [x] seems
nonetheless less common than the other primary consonants. In my own
not-so-formal statistical study of the most-natively-spoken languages
of the major 9 families (Mandarin for the Sino-Tibetan, Spanish for
the Indo-European, Arabic for the Afro-Asiatic, Telugu for the
Dravidan, Vietnamese for the Austro-Asiatic, Yoruba for the
Niger-Congo, Thai for the Tai-Kadai, Javanese for the Austronesian,
and Japanese for -- controversially -- the expanded group of the
Altaic), the generalized phonemes (e.g. not distinguishing the
aspirated and unaspirated, the rounded and unrounded) can be
frequency-sorted as follows:

consonants: /m t k n l s d y p b f r g w c h z x v R .../
(/m/ being the most common; /R/ representing minority dorsals such as
[q], [ɣ], [ʀ], etc.; /y/ and /w/ being the approximants; /c/ and /x/
having the same allophone sets as Lojban's)

vowels: /i u a o e .../

It appears that [ʒ] may be the least common primary Lojban sounds
among these language samples, although again more common than the
non-primary sound [θ].

Sometimes the /V'V/ form is hard for me to pronounce as [VhV] and not
sounding like [VxV] or [VV]. I find it useful that [θ] is an allophone
to [h] for /'/.

As for the diphthongs:

I don't natively speak English, but I've been exposed to its IPA
representations since I was a teen and done pretty intense efforts to
learn the pronunciations, particularly of the British accents. As far
as I'm aware, "site", "bite", and "buy" have the same prescriptive
diphthong /aɪ/ and are generally in England pronounced [ɐɪ]. [ɐ] is
central near-open (between [ɑ] as in the American "lot" and [æ] as in
the British/American "lamp", and below the schwa [ə]), and apparently
isn't in Lojban considered an allophone of /a/.

The same for "pie, why, thigh" and "might, nice, knights".

One example that may correspond to the combination of Lojban {y} and
{i} can be found in the London Cockney "meet", "feet", etc., where the
general long vowel [i:] becomes the diphthong [əi] and the closing
consonant becomes [ʔ], the glottal stop.

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