[lojban-beginners] Re: Just got my speakers back online...

[Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com>]

On 9/21/05, Hal Fulton <hal9000@hypermetrics.com> wrote:
> I had a minor nit with {detri}, mostly because of a high
> school speech teacher I had who was perhaps a little
> overzealous.
>
> It took me a while to get what she was arguing, but in
> the end I was convinced.

Convinced of what? That people pronounce consonants differently when
they're next to certain other consonants? Or that such a thing is
imprecise and incorrect? Linguists call these other sounds
allophones*. We perceive different sounds as being the same phoneme,
i.e. the same consonant/vowel. To say that this sort of thing is
either incorrect or even less than ideal is just silly. Your old
teacher was a victim of knowing just enough about something to be
dangerous but not enough to be right. When one deals with teaching
correct usage to dozens of children every day, one can lose grasp on
which features of the language are common, or even universal, in
standard usage.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophones

However, you're right to be more careful about these combinations in
Lojban, as different languages recognize different groups of phonemes
as being allophones, and thus "trat" and "tcrat" (in lojbanic
orthography) might be recognized as two different words. On the other
hand, I believe there are several groups of allphones that are common
to many languages, being natural progressions in the evolution of
pronunciation. (I'm not quite sure what those are.) Some of this can
be helped by using a different sound for some consonants that appear
in a lot of English allophones. I use a flapped 'r', as in Spanish,
for many lojban 'r's. I do have difficulty if the 'r' is after an 'n'
or an 'l', though. Spanish itself has those consonant combinations,
though, so maybe native speakers use a different, allophonic phoneme
for those combinations and I just never really noticed. Or maybe they
just speak Spanish better than me. :-(

Chris Capel
--
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)