Re: [lojban] Apologia, using h instead of yhy

On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 6:33 PM, Ilmen <ilmen.pokebip@gmail.com> wrote:

The breathy-voiced glottal fricative [ɦ] has also been suggested (maybe even used unconsciously) as a possible realization of ‹'›. This sound exists in at least some dialects of English as an allophone of ‹h› between vowels (as in "behind" for example).

—Ilmen.

On 24/06/2017 17:55, Remo Dentato wrote:

I agree that the initial idea was for ' to be replaceable by other unvoiced fricative sound. Quoting literally CLL 3:

-----

The apostrophe is included in Lojban only to enable a smooth transition between vowels, while joining the vowels within a single word. In fact, one way to think of the apostrophe is as representing an unvoiced vowel glide.

As a permitted variant, any unvoiced fricative other than those already used in Lojban may be used to render the apostrophe: IPA [θ] is one possibility. The convenience of the listener should be regarded as paramount in deciding to use a substitute for [h].

-----

I wonder, however, how many lojbanists nowadays would recognize a ' pronounced as θ rather than h . If, as CLL says, the convenience of the listner should be the first priority, then having ' fixed as h might be a good solution.

On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 1:53 PM, uakci <ciuak.prog@gmail.com> wrote:

also, my 3 cents:

<'> can be used for any other unused fricative sound (as described in the CLL), so it needn't be pronounced /h/ all the time, especially when one's native language doesn't have /h/. then, if we picked <h> to symbolize some non-/h/ sound, would it make sense anymore? (I'm not sure about that, but I guess that the founding fathers of the CLL were sure that using the grapheme <h> would mess things up.)

—mi'e la rupnu be li pi no ci be'o se ju la uakci

2017-06-24 11:18 GMT+02:00 Remo Dentato <rdentato@gmail.com>:

I've been away from lojban from quite some time but I'm still following the language development.
For what is worth, I believe using ' rather than h has proven itself not to bring any advantage.

The reasons brought up in CLL don't really stand, imho. I don't see how explaining morphology is any simpler or what harms causes 'h' being "heavier" than '.

As you rightly pointed out, it makes writing program that parse lojban text (slightly) more complex that it should be.
Also on any computer system we *have* to use h in identifiers as the single quote has a special meaninge (e.g. jbofihe).
Also, at least to me, the quote visually breaks the continuity of the text and it requires much more focus and attention to read.

By the way, Italian (my mother tongue) has no /h/ sound and this makes difficult for me to correctly pronounce ' . The letter 'h' has no phonological value (is never pronounced) but it's used sa a mark to distinguinsh (in writing) words with the same sound:

   hanno -> they have

   anno -> year

or change the pronunciation of c and g before i and e:

CIao     tʃ

CHIave k



GIoco dʒ
GHIro ɡ

That said, I think that slipping toward h and leaving ' as an historical feature would only be beneficial for the language.

muho mihe la remod.

On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 12:34 AM, <vpbroman@gmail.com> wrote:

I was questioned on my usually using "h" instead of " ' " in lojban,
so I would like to explain my reasoning and usage preference,
and I invite constructive criticism, since I am surely open to reason in reconsidering the issue.

First, like every supreme court justice nominee I have ever heard,
I understand the great value of "stare decicis", "let what is decided stand".
Zamenhof laid down the unchangeable Fundamento to avoid the chaos
of endless amendments by creative conlangers.
Still which "decisis" are the ones that must "stare"?

From 1955, TLI loglan had no kind of "h" or "x" until 1981,
when the former was added as a regular consonant phoneme,
and the latter was its special-case colleague.
This is still true of TLI Loglan.
By 1989, LLG loglan/lojban arose with a regular consonant "x" and a special " ' ".

In CLL1, the pronunciation is canonical, even if inexact,
but for the orthography there is a standard form,
as well as two alternatives that seem to be accepted (Cyrillic and Tengwar),
plus the International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA, used as the standard by which you define everything else.
That is four orthographies.

In the usage of other lojbanists I see experiments in orthography,
e.g. the grave accents placed on accented vowels,
or the underdots or over-breves placed on semivowels, or even a few people using h.
I think my usage is not far from the mainstream,
and I coexist happily with those who write differently.

My actual extremest position is to use IPA in a broad transcription when your fonts support it,
but to do CLL with h when ASCII-only is required.
The IPA is a very widely accepted international standard.
An IPA dress for lojban does not look that strange or different; see this example.

Now, which spelling is better and why?

In CLL1 3.3 the apostrophe, period, and comma are grouped together as characters that divide syllables,
but the period and comma are silent ways of separating words or syllables,
while the apostrophe is an audible way to separate syllables
in precisely the same way that "t" separates the syllables in "mlatu".
Nothing special there.

In the same section, we read
    The letter "h" is not used to represent this sound for two reasons:
    primarily in order to simplify explanations of the morphology,
    but also because the sound is very common, and the apostrophe
    is a visually lightweight representation of it.

The sound is not so very common as to justifying it being a special case.
In 130000 words of lojban I can quickly lay my hands on, the letter frequencies are as follows.
55421 i
46986 a
43758 u
38175 o
36048 l
27341 e
26722 n
21790 h/'
20522 c
17803 s
16437 r
14279 m
13755 t
13551 k
10828 d
9181 b
8832 p
7037 j
5199 g
5017 f
4713 y
4250 z
4130 v
3530 x
The h trails behind all the basic vowels and behind the consonants l and n, too, in frequency of use.

Even the measured time it takes to pronounce h, 77-109 msec for me,
similar in published results for other languages, is not like quicksilver.
In this respect, h is one of the faster fricatives, but in the middle of the pack for vowels, stops, and liquids.
So, why does it need a "lightweight" graphical representation?

What about the argument that spelling with apostrophe instead of h
simplifies explanations of morphology?
Except for "e" and "o" having the same phonology rules,
every other pair of letters differs in its allowed usages -- they are all special cases.
The h is far more constrained than the other consonants in its usage,
but it appears in every type of word except the gismu.

I think the principal rule that makes h seem special is the constraint
that brivla have a consonant pair in the first five letters of the word, after excluding h and y.
Still, if in this respect h is not a real consonant and y is not a real vowel,
then why is y allowed in the alphabet, but h not?

In terms of practical convenience, it is nice to be able to search in an editor for whole words
and have the editor software agree with you about what characters occur in words.
Typing /[a-z]+/ is much nicer than /[a-z',]+/.
And who wants to have to hack emacs syntax tables to search for words?

So, after I come to the conclusion that h/' ought to be in the alphabet as much as y or any consonant,
I think about how best to represent it.
The answer to that depends on past usage in other languages and on our desire to take advantage of
habit and familiarity to assist those learning lojban.
All the languages with latin alphabets that I know of that use the h sound
also use the h grapheme to represent it.
French lacks the sound so it uses the letter as a separator.
Spanish has only x which is written j.
Ancient Greek used to have a rough breathing sound represented by
a left-side arc or the left half of capital HTA,
while the apostrophe-looking mark represented the lack of an h at the start of a word.
Modern Greek has no h sound, just a x.

The use of "h" for the unvoiced glottal fricative seems like a slam dunk choice to me.

mihe la bremenli

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