Subject: RE: [lojban] g/k (was: RE: Re: More stuff

From: "Craig" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 10:50:40 -0500

>> At 03:14 PM 12/8/02 -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
>> >If you can convince me that garti/karti is worse that kalci/kelci, I'l
>> >be very impressed
>>
>> It IS worse. Indeed, one of the problems with text-to-(computer)-speech
>> with Lojban is the g/k distinction. Nora also comments that whispering
was
>> one of the considerations; I suspect also that we were trying to be
>> considerate of other languages that do not make a voiced/unvoiced
>> distinction (I believe Chinese is one)

>English is another, of course. I formerly rendered /g/:/k/ English-
>style as [k]:[kh], but then I had a terrible time understanding Nick
>who, following the official line, said [g]:[k]; I heard all his
>/p, t, k/ as /b, d, g/. So now I try to say [g]:[kh] -- to my ears,
>the /b, d, g/ come out sounding very French. Note that, as with
>English, this means that the contrast remains audible when whispering.
>(Interestingly, my son said to me the other day "Are you writing to
>[xod]?" with a fully voiced unEnglish-sounding (and hence French-sounding)
[d],
>so he must have noticed that the final consonant in _xod_ is not pronounced
in
>the English way.)

Huh. English is my native language, and I pronounce /p t k/ as [ph th kh]
prevocallically and [p t k] elsewhere; my /b d g/ is always [b d g].