Re: [lojban-beginners] oh my god, please make it stop, it hurts so much! (was: Re: Questions on the sounds chosen for Lojban)

[tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com>]

I agree with Timo that we want to avoid English-based representations
of foreign sounds. Is using English respelling keys not confusing even
among natives?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pronunciation_respelling_key

"e" is [ɛ] but "ew" is somehow [ju:], which is the general native
English sound of the alphabet "u", which itself in this scheme
represents [ʌ]. So, "pu" would be [pʌ] rather than [pju:] (better yet
[pu]), and "pew" would be [pju:] rather than something like [pɛw].
"ee" is for both [i] and [i:]. "oo" is for both [ʊ] and [u:]. "oor" is
[ʊər] (American "cure") but "ohr" is [ɔər] (American "force"), and
both "oh" and "oe" are for [oʊ] (American "goat"). This appears to me
less desirable than X-SAMPA in a cross-cultural context (not only
English x non-English but also English x English such as between the
US, the UK, Australia, etc., which may have different native
perspectives on respelling keys).

Here's a typical IPA-less, English-speaker-oriented beginner's guide
to languages:

http://wordsandphrases.wordpress.com/french-words-phrases/

The French "salut" is taught as "sah-lew". An uninformed reader might
learn it as two long vowels with an approximant [sɑ:'lju:], when the
correct pronunciation has no long vowel and approximant, [sa.ly]
(notice also that English is stress-timed while French is
syllable-timed; there is no distinctive stress in French words).
Fortunately, French has allophonic long vowels but don't phonemically
distinguish them from the short vowels, so [u:] instead of [u] isn't
much of a problem. However, it would be a trouble in languages that do
make such a distinction, such as German, Finnish, Japanese, Arabic,
and many others.

One of the contradictions in English as the most used auxiliary
language on Earth is that its phonology and orthography is relatively
so peculiar that it can't be used as a consistent and reliable means
for foreign language representations as much as may be desired.

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