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> > 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.
I think it would be much better for Anglophones to think
of vowel 'o' as equivalent to English 'aw' rather than
'oh', because it shouldn't be diphthongized under any
circumstance ('o' shouldn't sound the same as 'ow').
> > 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.
The glottal stop in between makes them all clear enough.
As for your previous question about glottal stops being
necessary, I do think so, because that way if you have
a word that ends in a consonant followed by one that
starts in a vowel, the syllable structure won't be
altered if the one uses a syllable-initial allophone
with a glottal stop: e.g. 'tal an' would sound [tal.?an]
instead of [ta.lan], thus retaining the CVC VC syllable
structure--[?a] would be the syllable-initial allophone
of phoneme /a/. Also, when two vowels meet, the glottal
stop helps a lot in keeping each one apart.
Maybe for English speakers, as also for us Spanish speakers,
it seems a bit odd to use glottal stops that way, but
that's nothing surprising for German speakers ('Angst' is
pronounced [?aNst], 'beamte' sounds as [bE.?am.tE] and so
on).
> 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?
Well, I'm a native Spanish speaker and I can assure you
that our word 'sea' is NEVER pronounced as [seja]--that's
a foreign-accent pronounciation of a possible word 'seya'
--but only as [se.a] or as [sea]--in Spanish there's a
marked tendency to glide adjacent vowels into one syllable,
a quite curious phenomenon known as 'sinalefa', which can
even create such "monstrous" glides as [oao] (dáselO A Otro),
[eeau] (relEE A Unamuno), [eoue] (no vEO HUEvos), etc.
> 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.
I think glottal stops are better used to keep syllable-
initial vowels as such. I think names can be signalled by
means of special preceding words, which could also be
used to classify it (proper masculine name, proper
feminine name, surname, city name, country name, etc.)
Cheers,
Javier