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on 4/20/02 7:58 AM, Rob Speer at rob@hidden.email wrote: > [The formatting here has been mangled a bit by my > numerous attempts to send this message. This is my > fifth attempt. Die, Yahoogroups.] > > I'm on vacation this week and don't have access to my > usual e-mail, but I must speak up against this > horrendous vowel system. > > Diphthongs like "ea" and "ey", or "ao" contrasted with > "au", simply should not exist. These are the reason > Lojban switched to ai, ei, oi, au, V'V as its only > vowel combinations. Did it? I had no idea. What's the best place to go to get a quick intro to Lojban? Those first four, I presume, are one-syllable diphthongs, right? > > V.V, with a glottal stop between the vowels, sounds > much uglier to me than V'V with an h-sound. But now I > see that neither should be necessary. > > Why make new letters for [dZ] and such? This was my > idea in the C(C)V(V) form. CC does not include CW. So > this would allow for both "jai" and "djai", assuming j > is changed to be the single phoneme [Z] like it should > be. Here's what I believe the CC combinations would > be, though I must be forgetting some: > > dj dz jb jd jg jv sf sk sp st ts xf xk xp xt zb zd zg > zv > (Those x-combinations are ugly as heck. If only x were > c.) > > So, these plus the 13 consonants yield 32 initial > consonant sounds. Then these could be combined with > the vowels: > a e i o u y ai ei oi au ia ie io iu iy ua ue ui uo uy All these are one syllable, right? With i and u acting as /j/ and /w/, I think this is a good track, but if we allow for some easily pronounced combos like ia EE-ah, EE-eh, etc, we considerable increase the word space. For me, combos like ea, ia, oa, ua, are pretty clear, while I agree that ao, au, sound far too much like each other and like aw. Has anybody, BTW come up with a summary of differences between Loglan and Lojban? That would be of great assistance to me. > for 640 possible cmavo*, even more than is necessary > for Lojban, and all of them one syllable (though they > could be pronounced as two with no ambiguity). > > I wasn't considering combinations like ia, ie, ua, ue, > etc. when I originally devised this, thinking that > words like "xpue" would be too diffcult to pronounce, > but in comparison to other proposals this is downright > easy. > > In response to something different: Lojban does not > have separate words > for uppercase letters, as there is no reason to refer > to uppercase letters. > There is a shift word that makes the next letter > uppercase (tau, I think) > and another that is a sort of "caps lock". As far as I > know these have never > been used. This is why I'd love to see a summary of differences. The standard line one usually hears is that the linguistic differences between Loglan and Lojban are minimal. I keep learning otherwise. I'd be very happy with one set of names for letters. > > Lojban certainly does not have separate words for > Greek letters, and it astonishes me that Loglan did. > What possible justification would there be for taking > up 25 words like that? Did people hold Greek spelling > bees in Loglan? Lojban uses .alfas. bu, and so on. > There is also a "Greek lock" which has also never been > used. > > Now that the numerous bounces of this message have given me a chance to read > more e-mail, it seems that Rex is going full speed ahead with Greek-letter > words. *Why?* Is there some wonderful use for these that I'm missing? > > The consonants are by, cy, dy, etc. The vowels are .a > bu, .e bu, etc. ' > is y'y. > > I think that y (schwa) as the vowel to attach to > consonants works rather > well. Something like "eu" (I refuse to call this "eo") > would grow tiresome > when pronouncing acronyms... Are the letter names used as pronouns as in Loglan? If so, I'd be inclined to reserve Cschwa for words and something more like Cay or Cey for letter names. Or, if we want variety, use rotating diphthongs -- bay, cey, doy, faw, gay, hey, joy. Might sound better and be more redundant. > > Now that Rex has changed his position on glottal stops, perhaps it would be > possible to accept .NN* (one or more non-consonants after a pause/glottal > stop) as a cmavo form. This would allow for more small words, and also allow > the space of words to not be as "packed". If so, I think I'd like to have them spelled with a pause/glottal symbol. period or apostrophe. To felin .e to kan pa dorm. To felin 'e to kan pa dorm. Probably the latter. Then '.' can be pi or poy or whatever for its function as a decimal point. > > * It is rather strange to be calling these words > "cmavo" in the context of Ceqli. What's Ceqli for > small+word? At this point, 'pivor'. -- >PLEASE NOTE MY NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS: rmay@hidden.email > Rex F. May (Baloo) > Daily cartoon at: http://www.cnsnews.com/cartoon/baloo.asp > Buy my book at: http://www.kiva.net/~jonabook/gdummy.htm > Language site at: http://www.geocities.com/ceqli/Uploadexp.htm >Discuss my auxiliary language at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/txeqli/