[lojban] Re: nth letter of the alphabet

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Dec 17, 2007 7:20 PM, Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu> wrote:
> On Monday 17 December 2007 16:28, Jorge Llambías wrote:
> > denpa bu, on the
> > other hand, does correspond to a phoneme. It only occurs at the beginning
> > or end of words, but then y'y never occurs at the beginning or end of words
> > (I like to think of them as complementary allophones).
>
> In utterances longer than single words, they are not allophones. {mi citka le
> stagi na.o le rectu} and {mi citka le stagi na'o le rectu} are both
> grammatical and parse differently.

Are the English phrases "less pots" and "less spots" pronounced differently?
(aspirated vs. unaspirated p?) Do they thus contain different phonemes?

Not that it matters for anything really, but according to wikipedia: "A common
test to determine whether two phones are allophones or separate phones
relies on finding so-called minimal pairs: words that differ only by the phones
in question", so it appears to be different words, not diferent
utterances, that
are relevant.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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