From a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com Sat Jan 20 09:49:18 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@egroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_0_1_2); 20 Jan 2001 17:49:18 -0000 Received: (qmail 13311 invoked from network); 20 Jan 2001 17:49:17 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l7.egroups.com with QMQP; 20 Jan 2001 17:49:17 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mta03-svc.ntlworld.com) (62.253.162.43) by mta2 with SMTP; 20 Jan 2001 17:49:17 -0000 Received: from andrew ([62.252.12.138]) by mta03-svc.ntlworld.com (InterMail vM.4.01.02.27 201-229-119-110) with SMTP id <20010120174915.YWIR10171.mta03-svc.ntlworld.com@andrew> for ; Sat, 20 Jan 2001 17:49:15 +0000 To: "Lojban@Egroups. Com" Subject: RE: [lojban] speech synthesizer Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2001 17:48:16 -0000 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 From: "And Rosta" > From: michael helsem [mailto:graywyvern@hotmail.com] > >From: Robin Lee Powell > >I've been wondering: why _does_ lojban use ' instead of h? > > so the anglophones don't forget it's not really pronounced like that. >From what I can gather, Lojban /'/ and English /h/ are pronounced the same by almost everyone, though it is not utterly unheard of to pronounce /'/ like English /T/. Lojbab has in the past rejected for /'/ on the grounds that /'/ is not (or not necessarily) pronounced [h], but then nor is English /h/, for good phonetic reasons (e.g. try saying [ihi]). The more kosher reason is that patterns of Cs and Vs are very important to Lojban morphology, /'/ doesn't function as a C, and (allegedly) people would tend to think of as representing a C. In hindsight, the <'> was rather a mistake. Other less odious solutions were available and the <'> is disproportionately noisome to many people. I believe that credit for dreaming up <'> goes to Lojbab... --And.