Try this again with my text added %^) At 02:04 PM 06/22/2000 -0400, pycyn@aol.com wrote:
<<BTW, I've been wondering anyway, how a conlang constructed by English speaking people includes 'rough' sounds like that /x/ Don't they show kind of a masochist trait? ;-) >> No, just a practical one (disguised, as often with JCB, as an empirical discovery). We needed another sound, we were misrepresenting a lot of language contributions by lacking an /h/-ish sound, we needed a sound that would be distinct in usual channels (as ordinary /h/ is not) and, lo, we found that most languages had a /x/ but not an actual /h/. And so, /x/ it was.
Actually, to be specific, the people who got together with me that weekend in May 1987 included my soon-to-be wife Nora who is a weak Francophone (weaker still after 13 more years with almost no practice), and linguists Gary Burgess and Tommy Whitlock, who were both students of phonology. Tommy has (or had at least) near native fluency in German and French, as well as passable skill in a couple of Semitic languages, and has studied Celtic languages as a hobby. Gary was a Russian linguist for the US Air Force. Both of them also had spent time in Greece and were reasonably conversant in Greek as well.
With that collection of languages (Greek, German, Russian, Celtic, Arabic/Semitic), as well as the linguistic analysis, it is very unsurprising that 'x' showed up. The real debate was whether we should include for symmetry the voiced and unvoiced pair of velar fricatives, just as we had pairs for all the rest of the unvoiced consonants, but we decided that this would indeed be difficult to teach to the poor English speakers %^). So I believe we defined the language to allow the voiced velar fricative as an allophone for the unvoiced one, though I haven't ever heard anyone use it.
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