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On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 12:08:04PM -0600, Rex May - Baloo wrote: > To elaborate a little on that, I think part of the problem may be the basic > pronunciation of 'e'. As an Anglophone, I contrast e and ej all the time > in ben and bane, pen and pain. And the same is done in Russian, and, I > think, spanish and japanese. So the best thing, I think, is to think of e > as the sound in bet, get, bed - an english/russian 'e'. Then ea, eo, and eu > will be EH-ah, EH-oh, Eh-oo, with or without glottal stops, and eya, eyo, > and eyu will be EH-yah, EH-yoh, EH-yoo. > > If we have to choose, tho, I'd rather have ea, eo, eu available for pinvor > and prohibit eya, eyo, eyu. "eu" I can deal with. It's pronouncable as a diphthong, so it could be the fifth in the set with ai, ei, oi, au. I don't know why I wasn't really considering it. "eo" takes a bit of effort to pronounce distinctly from "eu" or "ea". I'll mention once again that Lojban introduced the apostrophe just because all the little-words in Loglan sounded too similar to each other. With "ea", when I attempt to pronounce it smoothly it comes out sounding like ash, and I also keep getting drawn toward "eja" like in Spanish "sea". Maybe I'm missing something - is it supposed to sound like ash? I suppose that if "eja" and "ejo" are allowed as alternate pronunciations and those combinations are prohibited, it would work. But "eo" and "ea" seems like quite a stretch just to squeeze out a few more pinvor. What about the others? Are you still considering double vowels, oe, ou, etc? You really can't use a glottal stop between them, if you want glottal stops to be available to set apart names or words that begin with a non-consonant. -- Rob Speer