[lojban-beginners] Re: double letters

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On 7/19/07, Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu> wrote:
> Words with arbitrarily long or repetitive vowel or consonant sequences could
> be useful as ideophones or onomatopoeias.

Yes, but it's better if that is achieved within the phonotactic constraints
of the core words of the language. Words that violate some other
constraints could also be useful as ideophones or onomatopoeias and
yet we don't allow them.

> For instance, {tctcitci} could mean "it rattles".

And {bzbzuzu} could mean "it buzzes", but it doesn't fit the phonotactic
constraints, so we have to think of something else that does. {tctcitci}
would be no different.

For example {trititi} could also mean "it rattles" and it fits comfortably
within the core phonotactics.

> There's also a place in Tahiti called Faaa. It's actually
> Faa'a, but the apostrophe stands for a glottal stop, which cannot occur
> inside a Lojban word, so it would have to be {faaas} or the like.

I think a word internal glottal stop should be lojbanized as an apostrophe
in any case, because in some sense {.} and {'} can be considered as
allophones in Lojban, with complementary distributions: their
function is the same, they separate two vowels, one in word
boundaries and the other word internally. Faa'a could be {faa'as} if aa
is allowed, else {fa'a'as} or {faia'as} or {faua'as}.

{aa} does not occur in Spanish words, except in some names
of Arabic origin such as "Saa" or "Saavedra", but almost all other
vowel-vowel pairs do occur in Spanish.

But the important point is not whether they occur in Spanish or
Tahitian or any other language. The issue is that they don't occur in
Lojban core words, and so allowing them in non-core words is an
extension of the phonotactics.

The only reason Lojban has the apostrophe phoneme is to avoid
having vowel-vowel pairs, so it seems odd to let them in again
through the window of fu'ivla and cmevla. If vowel-vowel pairs not in
diphthongs had been acceptable for Lojban, we wouldn't have the
apostrophe to begin with (as in Loglan).

mu'o mi'e xorxes