Subject: Re: [lojban] What's the logic behind Lojban's sound system?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 09:42:00 EDT

In a message dated 4/27/2002 5:44:34 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Lojban is presented as a "logical" language, but so
> far I haven't been able to find the logic and consistency
> of its sound system. 

Lojban's clear claim to being logical extends only to syntax, which is based 
on that of first order predicate calculus, and which is all that needs to be 
controlled for pure Sapir-Whorf work. Attempts to extend logivality much 
beyond that point tends to cause whatever linguists or logicians are involved 
at the moment severe giggle attacks.
Answers to most questions about phonology look to simplicity or the base 
languages or the problems that native speakers of American English have with 
certain sequences.
1: /eu/ is hard to pronounce in a distinctive way, /ou/ is hard to 
distinguish from /o/
("hard" here referring to some selected listeners on some selected occasions 
long ago)
2. "yee" and "woo"
3. /x/ is a late comer, a cover for "h", modified to suit more of the base 
languages, none of which has the voiced form (in the standard dialect).
4. Simplicity and what is needed for the base languages.
5. The base languages for phonology are the old set (Sp, Fr, Ru, Ger, Eng, 
Chin, ...)
where the contrast is more apparent. However, the real reason is the history 
of /x/ which came in as /h/ then had /h/ and /x/ in free variation, then se
ttled on /x/ and then revived /h/ for a different purpose (not, incidentally 
necessarily /h/ "any voiceless consonant not readily confused with an 
existing Lojban sound" -- I use theta).
6. Simplicity, other languages, the fact that there is no convenient symbol 
for it.
7. No double letters (hard to tell from single), hard to pronounce (usual 
caveat), hard to hear in noisy environment.
8. well, Hindi arguably does, too, but the real reason is that the founder 
needed transitions between consonants that were still consonants for the 
purposes of word type classification (I'm not sure this is still true).