Subject: Re: [lojban] Some questions

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 09:01:25 +0200

"T. Peter Park" wrote:
> While I'm not an Israeli, I do gather from what I know "about"
> modern Israeli Hebrew that it's a 5-vowel language--as are
> Italian, Spanish, Modern Greek, Czech, Japanese, Tagalog, Swahili,
> (Caucasian) Georgian, Hawaiian, Samoan, Maori, and Fijian--

Italian is technically 7-vowel, but it still has nothing schwa-like.

> However, Lojban y, or something very similar to it, is a normal
> phoneme of 4 of the 6 base natlangs of Lojban--English, Russian,
> Chinese, and Hindi--

Russian is a controversial case -- there is a permanent dispute
between the two main schools of phonology on whether _y_ is a
phoneme or an allophone of _i_ after hard (unpalatalised) consonants.

> Perhaps half or more of the world's languages have a vowel sound
> more or less resembling Lojban "y".

Indeed. I'd have expected {j}, which is a good deal less common,
to be by far the most problematic fragment in Lojban phonology
(how do Israelis handle it?), being followed perhaps by the phonemic
distinction between {x} and {'}.

> Ancient Biblical Hebrew, I understand, had a rather more complex
> vowel system than modern Israeli Hebrew. Probably la mocex. and
> la daUID. or la celoMON. would have had little trouble with "y"!

Witness the origin of the almost standard name of the sound, _schwa_
(Hebrew <^swA'>, apparently cognate to <^sAw'> `vanity, nothingness').
In light of which it is ironic that Modern Hebrew speakers, of all
people, should find the sound difficult.

It would be fair to note, however, that the Biblical Hebrew schwa
is more of a counterpart to Lojban's uncharacterised buffer vowel
than a full-fledged vowel phoneme.

--Ivan