Re: x pronouciation from a french guy

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 03:58 AM 10/20/99 -0400, Paul Dufresne wrote:
>I am beginning to learn Lojban, mainly by studying gismus.
>But I never feel well when I see an 'x' because I am not sure
>at all how to pronounce it. I tend to think it is pronounced
>a bit like the 'k'.
>Let's take french words in example. For me the 'c' of
>"canot" would be lojbanize as "kano", and the 'c' of
>"cougar", would be lojbanize as "xugar".

My wife says that to her knowledge, French does not use the x sound, and no 
French word would Lojbanize as x.  She wasn't aware that "canot" and 
"cougar" would have different initial sounds, though.  Just as English 
speakers (who also do not have an x sound) you have to go to another 
language to get the x sound.  German "ch" as in "Bach" (hopefully you hear 
that as something other than Lojban "bak") is the model I use most 
often.  France having a lot of Arabic speakers can turn to Arabic as a 
model - I believe the Arabic sound Romanized as q is a Lojban x.  The 
voiced equivalent of x in Arabic is often Romanized as "gh", hence the 
spelling of the name of the leader of Libya is sometimes Romanized as 
Qadaffi or Ghadaffi.  The other models we use are the Russian sound 
Romanized as "kh", and the Greek "chi" (which is the reason why we use x 
for the sound).

Hope these examples help.

lojbab


----
lojbab                     ***NOTE NEW ADDRESS***           lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA               703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:
   see Lojban WWW Server: href=" http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/ "
   Order _The Complete Lojban Language_ - see our Web pages or ask me.