Re: [lojban] To Polish fellow lojbanists

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Thursday 30 September 2010 02:35:15 Krzysztof Sobolewski wrote:
> {ei} is a diphtong; we don't have "official" diphtongs in Polish, but the
> difference between "pei" (for {pe'i}) and "pej" (for {pei}) is very clear.
> When I want to be really precise when I'm writing "phonetically" using
> Polish ortography, I write "pe-i" for {pe'i} (assuming silent {'}, of
> course).

In Lojban [pɛi] and [pɛ.i] are the same word, while [pɛhi] is a different 
word. Whether the first two would be the same in Polish is irrelevant. 
Languages differ in how they divide sound space.

Another example, from Romance languages: I once was talking about the jatobá 
(fr:courbaril, es:guapinol, jbo:kurbarile), which is an ingredient in an 
herbal medicine I take, with a Brazilian, who deals in woods, including 
jatobá. I said [ʒato'ba]. He corrected me: it's [ʒatɔ'ba]. In French, as far 
as I know, [ɔ] occurs only in closed syllables (a minimal pair 
is "saute/sotte"), while in Spanish there is no distinction between [ɔ] and 
[o]. (The English realization of [ɔ] and [o] is different, so even though 
English is my first language, I relied on French, my second, when speaking 
Portuguese.)

Pierre
-- 
The Black Garden on the Mountain is not on the Black Mountain.

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