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Re: [lojban] Pronounciation
At 12:04 AM 05/11/2000 +0200, Elrond wrote:
After an initial look-through of the Lojban book, and some reading
on phonetics and some other pronouciation guides, I came back on the first
chapters, and I re-heared the recording of gismu pronounciation that is
available on the Internet at
ftp://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/pub/lojban/
Not specific enough an address, so I cannot hear how it came out
on-line. The speakers were (if I recall correctly) Nora and Tommy Whitlock
(who incidentally is considered to have an excellent French and German
accent when he speaks those languages, so he knows how to make clear
non-English sounds; I think he was trying to sound not-English, and he
obviously failed, given your comments).
I mean, especially the recording of the gismu in Lesson 02,
Exercice 2-1, given as a sample of the tape recording that (?) accompanies
the textbook. I do not know who are the two people who made this
recording, but gee, what horrible english accent they have !!!! (joke) I
suggest people who are not native english speakers having a hear of it and
comment back here...
First, let me include in this message the gismu list, as I could write it
back when listening to the recording, and compare it with the original:
Note that the purpose of this particular word list was to convey the sounds
of particular phonemes within the words. Emphasis was placed on having the
key sound be correct. That being the case, your transcription shows that
the on-line sampling fails, and hence should probably be removed.
It looks like english speakers are shy about sharping their vowels
Yes. But since the word list was focusing on consonants, this would nto
have been a concern.
and
voicing their fricatives!!
English 'r' is voiced and is made solely with the tongue and not the velum,
and is not a fricative but a flap.
This commentary is not intended to offend the authors of the
recording. The fact is, if this recording is given as an sample of spoken
Lojban, I have postulated that many english native speakers think it is
the right way to pronounce lojban sounds. I hope this is not the case, but
anyway I want to say that I clearly believe that this recording is *not* a
good lojban sample. Neither is, according to me, the other accompanying
recording featuring a discussion between two lojbanists, as I found in it
the same pronounciation problems.
Therefore, I decided to work on making some lojban sound samples
made with another accent than english (in my case, it will be french). I
think it would be a good idea if other people speaking natively other
languages could record some samples as well; if needed, as my ISP allows
us a fairly large storage space on personal web sites, I could set up a
sound records resource page.
You can find the first recordings at
http://grey.havens.free.fr/lojban/sound-records/
I'll let others judge and report how they find this recording. After all,
I liked the original version, so I am clearly too English to judge %^)
lojbab
----
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)