Subject: Re: [lojban] Pronounciation

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 07:07:27 -0400

At 12:04 AM 05/11/2000 +0200, Elrond wrote:
> After an initial look-through of the Lojban book, and some reading
>on phonetics and some other pronouciation guides, I came back on the first
>chapters, and I re-heared the recording of gismu pronounciation that is
>available on the Internet at
> ftp://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/pub/lojban/

Not specific enough an address, so I cannot hear how it came out 
on-line. The speakers were (if I recall correctly) Nora and Tommy Whitlock 
(who incidentally is considered to have an excellent French and German 
accent when he speaks those languages, so he knows how to make clear 
non-English sounds; I think he was trying to sound not-English, and he 
obviously failed, given your comments).

> I mean, especially the recording of the gismu in Lesson 02,
>Exercice 2-1, given as a sample of the tape recording that (?) accompanies
>the textbook. I do not know who are the two people who made this
>recording, but gee, what horrible english accent they have !!!! (joke) I
>suggest people who are not native english speakers having a hear of it and
>comment back here...
>
>First, let me include in this message the gismu list, as I could write it
>back when listening to the recording, and compare it with the original:

Note that the purpose of this particular word list was to convey the sounds 
of particular phonemes within the words. Emphasis was placed on having the 
key sound be correct. That being the case, your transcription shows that 
the on-line sampling fails, and hence should probably be removed.

It looks like english speakers are shy about sharping their vowels

Yes. But since the word list was focusing on consonants, this would nto 
have been a concern.

>and
>voicing their fricatives!!

English 'r' is voiced and is made solely with the tongue and not the velum, 
and is not a fricative but a flap.

> This commentary is not intended to offend the authors of the
>recording. The fact is, if this recording is given as an sample of spoken
>Lojban, I have postulated that many english native speakers think it is
>the right way to pronounce lojban sounds. I hope this is not the case, but
>anyway I want to say that I clearly believe that this recording is *not* a
>good lojban sample. Neither is, according to me, the other accompanying
>recording featuring a discussion between two lojbanists, as I found in it
>the same pronounciation problems.
>
> Therefore, I decided to work on making some lojban sound samples
>made with another accent than english (in my case, it will be french). I
>think it would be a good idea if other people speaking natively other
>languages could record some samples as well; if needed, as my ISP allows
>us a fairly large storage space on personal web sites, I could set up a
>sound records resource page.
>
>You can find the first recordings at
>http://grey.havens.free.fr/lojban/sound-records/

I'll let others judge and report how they find this recording. After all, 
I liked the original version, so I am clearly too English to judge %^)

lojbab
----
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)