Subject: Re: [lojban] brify

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 14:02:33 +0100

Greg:
#> **I haven't listened to this**, but I find it surprising if Bjoern is a German
#> speaker, since it would imply that he is speaking Lojban without a
#> German accent but with an English accent. I may well be wrong, but
#> I suspect that Robin's perceptions of the e/y boundary are tainted
#> by English.
#
#neither have I (and maybe I should before emitting loads of hypotheses) but
#I suspect Bjoern's pronunciation is something like the long schwa at the end
#of german words like "besser" [bEs@]??

In the German accents I'm familiar with, that would be [bEs(@)A], where
[A] = turned a -- i.e. a basically A-type sound. But why would a German
speaker pronounce _brife_ as though it were _brifer_?

Steven:
#and:
#it doesn't surprise me in the least. the same thing happened with german 
#speakers of esperanto at the augsburg congress. they invariably pronounced 
#the final '-e' as a schwa, even when the rest of their pronunciation was 
#quite good. it used to irritate me a lot. if the same thing happens in 
#lojban, it just shows how strong some habits are.

But what I don't understand is how you can consider it a strong habit,
when final -e in German is E-like rather than schwa-like. It seems rather
mysterious that Germans should in their Lojban and Esperanto speech
all tend to introduce a mispronunciation whose aetiology is not transparently
a carryover from their native language. Maybe there are German accents
I'm not familiar with in which final -e is schwa-like; my limited exposure to 
them has a southern bias.

--And.