In a message dated 4/27/2002 5:44:34 PM Central Daylight Time, uaxuctum@yahoo.es writes:Lojban is presented as a "logical" language, but so Lojban's clear claim to being logical extends only to syntax, which is based on that of first order predicate calculus, and which is all that needs to be controlled for pure Sapir-Whorf work. Attempts to extend logivality much beyond that point tends to cause whatever linguists or logicians are involved at the moment severe giggle attacks. Answers to most questions about phonology look to simplicity or the base languages or the problems that native speakers of American English have with certain sequences. 1: /eu/ is hard to pronounce in a distinctive way, /ou/ is hard to distinguish from /o/ ("hard" here referring to some selected listeners on some selected occasions long ago) 2. "yee" and "woo" 3. /x/ is a late comer, a cover for "h", modified to suit more of the base languages, none of which has the voiced form (in the standard dialect). 4. Simplicity and what is needed for the base languages. 5. The base languages for phonology are the old set (Sp, Fr, Ru, Ger, Eng, Chin, ...) where the contrast is more apparent. However, the real reason is the history of /x/ which came in as /h/ then had /h/ and /x/ in free variation, then settled on /x/ and then revived /h/ for a different purpose (not, incidentally necessarily /h/ "any voiceless consonant not readily confused with an existing Lojban sound" -- I use theta). 6. Simplicity, other languages, the fact that there is no convenient symbol for it. 7. No double letters (hard to tell from single), hard to pronounce (usual caveat), hard to hear in noisy environment. 8. well, Hindi arguably does, too, but the real reason is that the founder needed transitions between consonants that were still consonants for the purposes of word type classification (I'm not sure this is still true). |