From iad@MATH.BAS.BG Fri Mar 16 23:07:02 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: iad@math.bas.bg X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_0_4); 17 Mar 2001 07:07:02 -0000 Received: (qmail 926 invoked from network); 17 Mar 2001 07:07:02 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m8.onelist.org with QMQP; 17 Mar 2001 07:07:02 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO lnd.internet-bg.net) (212.124.64.2) by mta3 with SMTP; 17 Mar 2001 08:08:05 -0000 Received: from math.bas.bg (ppp58.internet-bg.net [212.124.66.58]) by lnd.internet-bg.net (8.11.1/8.9.0) with ESMTP id f2H7Fic03518 for ; Sat, 17 Mar 2001 09:15:44 +0200 Message-ID: <3AB30BC5.F98C820C@math.bas.bg> Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 09:01:25 +0200 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.74 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Some questions References: <3AB17AF7.503F@erols.com> <3AB29D2C.D6E@erols.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Ivan A Derzhanski "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