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.