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[lojban-beginners] Re: lojbanization
On 5/23/07, Vid Sintef <picos.picos@gmail.com> wrote:
Hasn't Lojban been designed to be as culturally neutral as possible?
Let's imagine it has, then I think that part of this goal is to have a
comparatively small phoneme inventory, because including every sound
that is in use as a distinct phoneme in at least one language would
result in a phoneme inventory so large that it would hardly be
culturally neutral!
However, having a small phoneme inventory also means that you cannot
unambiguously represent a word from another language exactly as that
language pronounces it.
It's possible to have a range of allophones (for example, Lojban /r/
is "any rhotic consonant" IIRC, not limited to e.g. American retroflex
r or Spanish trilled r or German rasped r), but you can't force a
particular allophonic pronunciation (for example, you can't even
specify whether apostrophe is to be pronounced as English "h" in
"hand" or English "th" in "thank" -- if you write {.e'Eminueis.},
someone could validly pronounce it "Etheminwayce").
I do really love Lojban; but I would have loved it more if there were other
options than {XEminueis.} or {.e'Eminueis.} for the name "Hemingway",
for instance.
I, on the other hand, am glad that I don't need to learn tones (as in
Chinese), pharyngealised consonants (as in Arabic), or unaspirated
voiceless dental stops (as in Spanish) in order to pronounce Lojban
properly.
Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@gmail.com>