[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [lojban] Re: Towards Lojban for Beginners version 2.0
Pierre Abbat, On 26/02/2013 01:39:
On Monday, February 25, 2013 09:40:01 Adam Chevalier wrote:
That isn't my point. taibei, as a lojbanized name, isn't how its pronounced
locally or in English.
If there intention was to teach that lesson, important as it is, they
should have used a proper example.
There are two things going on with that name:
1. Mandarin distinguishes aspirated and unaspirated stops; Lojban
distinguishes voiceless and voiced stops. To preserve the Mandarin
distinction, we should map the unaspirated /p/ to<b>, as Pinyin does.
I remember that when I met Nick Nicholas and he spoke Lojban to me, he didn't aspirate his Lojban /p,t,k/, and because the great majority of English accents nowadays aspirate /p,t,k/ (in syllable onsets), I couldn't help hearing them as /b,d,g/ and so mishearing what he was saying. Probably if I'd been more accustomed to hearing that accent of Lojban I'd have heard through it and not noticed the phonetics.
FWIW I doubt that most Lojban speakers do base the /p,t,k:b,d,g/ opposition on voicing rather than aspiration; for those whose native accents don't do it, it requires too much phonetic sophistication. Nick could do it because he was bilingual in Greek, and used Greek phonetics for the Lojban stops.
--And.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.