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[lojban] Re: nth letter of the alphabet
On Monday 17 December 2007 16:28, Jorge Llambías wrote:
> 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.)
"i" is a letter of the Lojban alphabet, but it's under the ==sorbau== header,
because it's a letter of the alphabets of many other languages too. I should
put an entry for the Turkish alphabet, because the capital form in Turkish is
different. The Lojban entry for "i" defines it as the sentence separating
cmavo.
> 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).
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.
Pierre
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