Subject: Re: [lojban] RE: apostrophic fits

From: Lin Zhemin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 01:06:12 +0800

The first problem is that I cannot read the special characters in your
text... I can merely read Latin-1 (ISO8859-1) character set...

IIRC, lojban prononciation is not precisely defined. I remember once I
had discussed with Bob about lojban _r_, and he answered me that (in my
own words) any utterance which can make one feel like hearing _r_ can
be one of its prononciations. So that I don't think there is any
prononciation, even the one written in the Referance Grammar, is
standard. If I said the apostroph sign _'_ to be refered as a 'stop'
or 'pause', I took it in convinience, since not everyone is linguist.
In standard IPA, _'_ can be totally ignored: if I write a segment as
[taim] (in narrow transcription), it should be only pronounced [taim],
and not as what English native speaker may pronounce ([thai~m] where
h is superscripted and i~ is an i with a tilde), and not as [taim] as
other people may pronounce, where there is a glide between a and i.

However I don't think the discussion would be useful for anyone who is
not a linguist.

In lojban, the alphabet x and ' are just different. x should be
pronounced as [h] or [x], both are allophones of [x], and ' is not [h].
Try to pronounce coi and co'o, you don't pronounce the latter as
"shoho" but "sho-o". However I had ever found some examples in the very
first version of lojban tape, which are considered by me incorrect,
such as _le du'u_ to be pronounced as _le duxu_ (you can even clearly
hear the uvular fricative!)

IPA theta ? Would you mean the sound like 'th' in English 'three'?

Thu, 01 Feb 2001, la [email-masked]([email-masked]) cusku di'e
> The apostrophe is NOT a glottal stop or any kindof pause – such critters 
> function differently in Lojban.  It is a voiceless fricative different 
> fromall the others in the language (x,c,s,f)and it also should not be 
> confusablewith a glide between two vowels (/a’e/ should not be confusable 
> with /aie/, say).  The official line is that it is IPA[h].  However, many 
> speakers do notalways distinguish x from [h] (indeed [h] is an allophone of 
> /x/ even instandard Lojban) and [h] is often in effect a voiceless form of 
> the followingvowel, causing a glidelike sound when the following vowel is 
> almost anythingbut /a/ or /y/ (and maybe then, for all I can tell).  When 
> unclarity arises in either of these ways, I use andrecommend IPA theta (the 
> “th” sound most places except before “e” in English),which has neither of 
> these problems. Even I, however, cannot remember to use it until the problem 
> arises. 

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