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Re: [lojban] phonetics was: what's the deal with place tags?
Pierre Abbat, On 10/04/2011 14:38:
On Sunday 10 April 2011 07:35:48 And Rosta wrote:
You're kind of missing the point. It doesn't matter at all if a Lojban
speaker has trouble saying [zb] or [ml], because /z(%)b/ and /m(%)l/ can be
realized not only as [zb] and [ml] but also as [z £ b] and [m £ l], where
"£" stands for whatever the realization of % is.
Furthermore, relevant considerations go beyond mere articulatory difficulty
to include also acoustic distinctiveness. For example, even if [ml] is easy
to say, it might be hard for either speaker or hearer to reliably
distinguish /lemlatu/ [lemlatu] from /lemblatu/ [lemblatu], but much easier
to distinguish /lem%latu/ [lemylatu] from /lemblatu/ [lemblatu]. Likewise
for /ns/ vs /nts/ and other clusters; judicious use of the buffer vowel can
mitigate some of the failings of Lojban phonology.
/nts/ isn't allowed.
Yes, sorry -- change the examples to /ms/ vs /mps/, /mc/ vs /mpc/, /mj/ vs /mbj/.
Conversely, the existence of the buffer vowel renders the prohibition of clusters unnecessary; any consonant cluster whatever could be unproblematically permitted.
I don't know about how buffer vowels work in natlangs, but I do know there is
at least one. Armenian has both a buffer vowel and a letter for schwa. From
what I've read, they're pronounced the same.
I don't know of any natural language with buffer vowels (because my knowledge is scanty, not because I know there aren't any). What makes the Armenian buffer vowel a buffer vowel?
I guess the Lojban buffer vowel has two key characteristics:
(1) it doesn't contrast with phonetic zero interconsonantally,
(2) its realization is defined as "anything distinct from the other vowels" (-- comparable to the realization rule for /'/). (CLL also says the realization must be as close to schwa as possible but clearly distinct from schwa, so I ignore this stipulation as contradictory, though I suppose CLL could quite easily be read as implicitly stipulating /%/ = [ə] and /y/ = [əː].)
(1) seems pretty straightforward. In some accents of English schwa doesn't contrast with phonetic zero in some environments, and [ʔ] doesn't contrast with zero before an intonation-phrase-initial vowel. The obvious analysis in such cases is a bare structural position that may or may not be filled with default phonetic content. So Lojban is to be analysed as a strict CV language.
(2) is much weirder, and one suspects it of being unnatural. However, there's a similarish case in (English) English where the range of realizations of /r/ across idiolects (but not within idiolects) can be summed up as "any approximant that is not already the realization of another phoneme".
--And.
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