[lojban-beginners] Re: Anyone there?

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 06:13:02PM +1000, Tristan Mc Leay wrote:
>  --- Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote: 
> > On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 04:19:42PM +1000, Tristan Mc Leay wrote:
> > >  --- Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote: 
> > > 
> > > > It's actually the lack of short 'i' that pisses me off.  :-)
> > > 
> > > Why is it that [I] isn't an allophone of /i/? 
> 
> You didn't answer this qn. Is it just random? Perhaps you don't know?
> It's something that bugs me.

Well, I sort of did.  In my dialect, those sounds are so amazingly far
apart that I find the idea of them being allophones rather bizarre.

More importantly, it's used as a buffer vowel.  You can insert short 'i'
anywhere there's a consonant cluster than you can't pronounce (hence me
Lojbanizing my name with rabn).

> > > For most people in the world, they're close enough that it's hard
> > > to distinguish anyway... (I'm a native English speaker, and out of
> > > context, I find hearing [i] vs [I] difficult; [I] is many times
> > > easier for me to produce than [i] though.)
> > 
> > /me blinks.
> > 
> > You find the "i" in "bit" hard to distinguish from the "ee" in
> > "beet"?
> 
> No, not at all. But the 'ee' in 'beet' is a diphthong IMD (starting
> from something like [@] and ending at somewhere like [i]). The 'i' in
> 'bit' is a short vowel. 

Wow.  That doesn't resemble my dialect even a little.

Can you give me an example of a word with [I] in it?

I have difficulty imagining two sounds more easy to distinguish than [i]
and [I], so this is a really wierd discussion for me.

-Robin

-- 
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Reason #237 To Learn Lojban: "Homonyms: Their Grate!"