[lojban] Re: nth letter of the alphabet

["Jorge Llambías" <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On Dec 17, 2007 6:02 PM, Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu> wrote:
> I wrote an article [[i]] on the Lojban Wiktionary in which the first
> definition says that it's a letter of the alphabet.

But is it? In English, it's correct to define the word "i" as a letter, because
that's one of the menings of that word, for example as used in the sentence
"i before e except after c". But in Lojban "i" does not name a letter. Or maybe
Wiktionary entries are not just for words, but also for symbols?  (If
it was "I",
pronounced /ibu/, that would perhaps be better, though it's a cmavo compound
of two words in this case.)

> On the English
> Wiktionary, letters of the alphabet are given their ordinal number. In
> Lojban, y'y, slaka bu, and denpa bu come before abu. I have no qualm with
> counting y'y as a letter, but what about slaka bu and denpa bu? Slaka bu
> makes no difference to the identity of a word, only its pronunciation, and
> denpa bu does not occur within words.

I wouldn't count slaka bu as a letter, any more than preti bu for example,
because it corresponds to no phoneme of the language. 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).

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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