From jcowan@reutershealth.com Fri Jan 19 09:19:20 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: jcowan@reutershealth.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@egroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_0_1_2); 19 Jan 2001 17:19:17 -0000 Received: (qmail 37403 invoked from network); 19 Jan 2001 17:12:40 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m8.onelist.org with QMQP; 19 Jan 2001 17:12:40 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta3 with SMTP; 19 Jan 2001 18:13:45 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@[192.168.3.11]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA29388; Fri, 19 Jan 2001 12:14:25 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <3A68757F.3050402@reutershealth.com> Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 12:12:31 -0500 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.2.16-22 i686; en-US; m18) Gecko/20001107 Netscape6/6.0 X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Robin Lee Powell Cc: michael helsem , lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] speech synthesizer References: <20010119114611.C29655@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan Robin Lee Powell wrote: > I've been wondering: why _does_ lojban use ' instead of h? Historically, the vowel pairs with ' were originally written without it, and you simply had to know that "ai" was a diphthong and "eu" was two separate vowels. The current Lojban opposition between "ai" and "a'i" did not (does not, in Institute Loglan) exist. Morphologically, "h" would suggest a consonant, but ' works more like a diacritic on a vowel-pair, like the French trema. -- There is / one art || John Cowan no more / no less || http://www.reutershealth.com to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein