Bob LeChevalier wrote:
Well, that's the question to be asked, isn't it. We have a solution already, which unquestionably does NOT work. Do we jettison it in favor of one that might? We have to pick our catastrophe.John E Clifford wrote:It seems to me that no trick so far discussed will work in practice: we will not remember to exempt certain syllables from names, we will forget pauses (though making {la} and the like to be learned as {la.} where the period is a genuine glottal stop might improve things).That is the essence of the problem.Without a solution that unquestionably will work and be used in practice, the justification for changing the baselined status quo isn't there.
Those who like the pause-all-the-time solution can implement the practice of pausing all the time to show that in fact people can and will learn to do so, which could at least partially negate this argument; that is a legal dialect. I suspect such a dialect would be aesthetically displeasing, but we'd be able to judge by example.I don't deny the potential aesthetic problems, though aesthetics is in the ear of the beholder. A lot of Lojban's sound-system is already considered "aesthetically displeasing" by many listeners (usually outside of the Lojban camp). But audio-visual isomorphism is a more important consideration for Lojban (to me) than aesthetics.
Look, we already ARE using something that occurs nowhere else in the word: the pause! Plans to use something even more obtrusive in that role aren't going to help.Again, usingsomething that occurs nowhere else (the glottal stop is a difficult-to-use-or-remember-or-hear example) seems the safest route (and can be used, as was pointed out some time ago, to deal withborrowings as well).We tried the "something that occurs nowhere else" trick for fu'ivla compounding, using ",iy," as the hyphen. I think someone eventually came up with a "somewhere else" and it was aesthetically displeasing to people as well.
~mark