Re: [lojban] Ease of learning for different native languages

[Alexander Kozhevnikov <alexkoz@gmail.com>]

I got some more thoughts thanks to my just written out reply to the 
lojbanized-name-in-unix/linux thread:

Russian, I think, warps the mind a little with regards to pronounciation 
(I suspect many natlangs do), in ways that are relevant:

1. Typical Russian speech turns the A and O sounds into the shwah 
(spelling?) sound when the syllables it's in are not stressed. I think 
this warps our notions of what those two letters/phonemes sound like when 
unstressed.

2. We similarly say our equivalent to lobjan's "v" as lojban's "f" when 
it's at the end of a word.

3. I remember being taught that each word has exactly one stressed 
syllable. I think this notion had the most warping impact on me 
personally, though I can't say if that's only because of me having 
incidentally learned and thought about that one at the right moment in my 
formative stages.

4. In Russian we have this notion that the letter combinations equivalent 
to lojban's "ji" and "ci" are actually pronounced not with what lojban's 
"i" maps to, but with this other vowel we have, (at least I'm pretty sure 
it's a vowel), represented by the letter 'ы'. I am not feeling up to 
digging up the IPA symbols for it and verifying for certain if it's one of 
the acceptable ones for lojban's "i", but I'm fairly confident it isn't. I 
still have to frequently catch myself when reading these combinations in 
lojban.

I think lojban teaching material for Russians will need to account for all 
of the above points early on, and by "account for" I mean explicitly bring 
the reader's attention to, and then dismiss as not being unversal speech 
"realities" (I think monolinguals with little to no foreign language 
experience in particular are very good at deluding themselves into 
thinking that the way their language implicitly substitutes certain 
letters/symbols with non-correspondant phonemes is natural and possibly 
even inate to all human speech), and instruct the reader that it 
is definitely not correct in lojban.

mi'e .aleksandr.kojevnikov. mu'o

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