Re: [lojban] speech synthesizer

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@csclub.uwaterloo.ca>]

On Fri, Jan 19, 2001 at 12:12:31PM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> 
> > I've been wondering: why _does_ lojban use ' instead of h?
> 
> Historically, the vowel pairs with ' were originally written without
> it, and you simply had to know that "ai" was a diphthong and "eu"
> was two separate vowels.  The current Lojban opposition between
> "ai" and "a'i" did not (does not, in Institute Loglan) exist.

<nod>

> Morphologically, "h" would suggest a consonant, but ' works more like
> a diacritic on a vowel-pair, like the French trema.

<nod>

It's still _incredibly_ obnoxious when computing.

-Robin

-- 
http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rlpowell/ 	BTW, I'm male, honest.
Information wants to be free.  Too bad most of it is crap.  --RLP