Subject: RE: [lojban] speech synthesizer

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2001 17:48:16 -0000

> From: michael helsem [mailto:[email-masked]]
> >From: Robin Lee Powell <[email-masked]>
> >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 <h>
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 <h> 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.