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Re: [lojban] Re: "la" rule

Chris Capel wrote:


On 11/14/06, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:

Bob LeChevalier, On 14/11/2006 21:31:
> 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.
"Pause-all-the-time" is a very misleading description. The solution is rather to replace the words {la}, {lai} and {doi} by {la.}, {lai.} and {doi.}, i.e. [la?], [lai?], [doi?].
The idea that the phoneme /./ is realized by a pause at all, let alone as its primary allophone, is lunacy in a human language. A much more sensible analysis of the situation in Lojban is that the phoneme /./ (realized as [?]) can be unrealized when at the edge of a phonological string. 

Your "realized as a" symbol, which I assume is some IPA, shows up as a
"?" for me. Is it a glottal stop?
Actually, as it happens, the IPA symbol for a glottal stop does look a lot like a question mark, and so a question is often (as here) used for it in ASCII situations. Bob's an ASCII kind of guy, I've found. 
I have a bit of difficulty pronouncing a glottal stop in the middle of
a speech stream, and getting it to sound different from without, or
from being apparent enough. For instance, the two

la.clsn
laclsn

sound pretty much the same the way I say them.
Well, glottal stops are full consonants in many languages, and as such appear in mid-speech-stream all the time. There's probably a bunch of examples in English too, but it depends very much on your idiolect and the particular speed and register you're using at the time.
The (required) difference between the two is the same as the difference between {la lojbanmo} and {la lojban. mo}: whether or not there's a pause. Just a pause in a different place, that's all. Realizing it as a glottal stop is just a handy choice of allophone.
Maybe someday we can get a nice big ol' list of things people wonder how to pronounce, and contexts in which to demonstrate them. I flatter myself that my pronunciation is pretty precise and I can produce most sounds in question (except a trilled r, for some reason); I could just record a bunch of sound files for the website. 

~mark