Subject: Re: [lojban] on Lojban pronunciation

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 18:17:40 -0400

Try this again with my text added %^)

At 02:04 PM 06/22/2000 -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
> <<BTW, I've been wondering anyway, how a conlang constructed by English
> speaking people includes 'rough' sounds like that /x/
> Don't they show kind of a masochist trait? ;-) >>
>
>No, just a practical one (disguised, as often with JCB, as an empirical
>discovery). We needed another sound, we were misrepresenting a lot of
>language contributions by lacking an /h/-ish sound, we needed a sound that
>would be distinct in usual channels (as ordinary /h/ is not) and, lo, we
>found that most languages had a /x/ but not an actual /h/. And so, /x/ it
>was.

Actually, to be specific, the people who got together with me that weekend 
in May 1987 included my soon-to-be wife Nora who is a weak Francophone 
(weaker still after 13 more years with almost no practice), and linguists 
Gary Burgess and Tommy Whitlock, who were both students of 
phonology. Tommy has (or had at least) near native fluency in German and 
French, as well as passable skill in a couple of Semitic languages, and has 
studied Celtic languages as a hobby. Gary was a Russian linguist for the 
US Air Force. Both of them also had spent time in Greece and were 
reasonably conversant in Greek as well.

With that collection of languages (Greek, German, Russian, Celtic, 
Arabic/Semitic), as well as the linguistic analysis, it is very 
unsurprising that 'x' showed up. The real debate was whether we should 
include for symmetry the voiced and unvoiced pair of velar fricatives, just 
as we had pairs for all the rest of the unvoiced consonants, but we decided 
that this would indeed be difficult to teach to the poor English speakers 
%^). So I believe we defined the language to allow the voiced velar 
fricative as an allophone for the unvoiced one, though I haven't ever heard 
anyone use it.

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