Chris Capel wrote:
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.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?
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.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.
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.
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