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.