Re: Accent

[Ivan A Derzhanski <iad@xxxx.xxx.xxx]

Robin Turner wrote:
> la .ivan cusku di'e
> > Oh, there is no shortage of languages with a single /l / r/
> > phoneme [...]. Apart from Mandarin, [...]
> 
> For once I think I've caught Ivan out!

Fie, fie, Robin! Caught me out? You should not even dream
of doing such a thing.

> Although Mandarin doesn't have exactly the same /l/r/ sounds
> as English, there's still a distinction e.g. "ren", "li".

Yes, Mandarin does have an initial that is written as _r_
in pinyin (and as _j_ in some other romanisation systems,
and as Cyrillic _zh_ in Palladius' system). Its most common
realisation is, from what I've heard and read, /z./ (voiced
retroflex fricative). Can one say that it is a/the Mandarin
/r/ phoneme? Of course, since notations for phonemes are
merely convenient labels. Does it follow that a Mandarin
speaker would/should pronounce Lojban {r} as Mandarin _r_?
By no means. It would be a natural choice if the closest
Mandarin thing to Lojban {r} were _r_ and if the closest
Lojban thing to Mandarin _r_ were {r}; but in fact the various
European _r_ sounds are universally rendered as _l_ in Chinese
(`Robin' _Luo2bin1_, `Rousseau' _Lu2suo1_, `Ruhr' _Lu3er3_,
`Rome' _Luo2ma3_), and if I heard the _r_ of _ren2_ in Lojban
speech, I reckon I would interpret it as {j} rather than {r}.

(There is the `other' _r_, the one in _er_, which has nothing
to do with the initial except that it happens to be written
with the same letter in pinyin; but that doesn't have the
distribution of a consonant, so I'm disregarding it here.)

-- 
`Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.' (Chief Seattle)
Ivan A Derzhanski <http://www.math.bas.bg/~iad/>
H: cplx Iztok bl 91, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria <iad@math.bas.bg>
W: Dept for Math Lx, Inst for Maths & CompSci, Bulg Acad of Sciences