Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Baseline statement

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Dec 2002 03:28:17 +1100

On Friday, Dec 6, 2002, at 23:07 Australia/Melbourne, John Cowan wrote:

> Nick Nicholas scripsit:
>
>> Besides, now that I've read the blasted thing, John had anticipated
>> this anyway:
>>
>> Lojban sruti'o = Loglan sruti,o
>> Lojban srutio = Loglan srutio
>>
>> The comma is a phoneme in Loglan transliteration, which does much of
>> the work of the Lojban apostrophe. Therefore, sruti'o and srutio are
>> distinct in Lojban, and this is not annulled in the Loglan
>> transliteration, which also renders them distinctly. Therefore the
>> difference between the two remains legit.
>
> Alas, no, he's right and you and I are wrong.
>
> The mapping in lujvo is Std "i'o" = Alt "io", since Std "io" can't 
> occur
> in lujvo. The mapping in fu'ivla is Std "i'o" = Alt "i,o" and Std 
> "io" =
> Alt "io".
>
> So Std "sruti'o" (being a lujvo) maps to Alt "srutio", and "Std" 
> "srutio"
> (being a fu'ivla) maps to Alt "srutio". Bzzzzt.

Oh buggery.

OK, a couple of things:

* Raymond's Tengwar doesn't have commas or dots. Therefore, if the CLL 
Loglan orthography means that the sruti'o/srutio distinction in Loglan 
is illegal, then the Raymond Tengwar means that a distinction between 
lis.te and liste is illegal. And remember, CLL does not say the Loglan 
transliteration is inherently less 'oddball' than the Tengwar.

* The Loglan transliteration clearly isn't quite a full representation 
of the same phonology in different orthography, but a near enough.

* In Loglan terms, srutio is always pronounced as [srutjO] (with a 
mid-open vowel, whereas normal o is mid-close!) If the rapproachment 
were to take place, this would mean that Loglanists would have a 
distinct accent which neutralises the distinction between io and i'o 
outside of non-Lojban words and attitudinals --- but neutralises it in 
the direction of [jO] ("yaw"), not [iho]. So if this were ever to have 
happened seriously, and Loglanists pronounced the forms like Loglan, 
not just read them like Loglan, then it *would* have represented a 
change in Lojban phonology.

* I don't know how this can be patched, and if I didn't think this 
whole thing was pointless, I'd rather discard the whole thing in an 
erratum and just say that i'V and u'V *always* map to i,V and u,V, 
whatever the morphology of the word. So the loglanists who never came 
to dinner have a few more commas to deal with. They're getting them in 
a'i = a,i anyway. So if they have to write:

vlatai = vlatai
vlata'i = vlata,i

I see no good reason why they shouldn't also write

srutio = srutio
sruti'o = sruti,o

* The notion that Loglan transliteration constrains Lojban phonotactics 
remains perverse. I want the "Get A Grip" reading to apply to all of 
2.12. If not, then I would support an erratum adding at the end that 
"where any of these orthographies fail to make distinctions made in the 
conventional Roman orthography of Lojban, the latter is regarded as 
binding for the phonotactics of Lojban."

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Nicholas||||||
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