Re: [lojban] speech synthesizer

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Robin Lee Powell wrote:

> I've been wondering: why _does_ lojban use ' instead of h?

Historically, the vowel pairs with ' were originally written without
it, and you simply had to know that "ai" was a diphthong and "eu"
was two separate vowels. The current Lojban opposition between
"ai" and "a'i" did not (does not, in Institute Loglan) exist.

Morphologically, "h" would suggest a consonant, but ' works more like
a diacritic on a vowel-pair, like the French trema.

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