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selpa'i, On 17/09/2012 00:11:
Am 16.09.2012 23:47, schrieb Mike S.:What is the phonological value of <h>, which I have been using experimentally?Nothing but [x, h] makes any sense. Agreed, and probably only one of /x h/ should be allowed. The other alternative is that /h/ is pronounced as the breathy-voiced glottal fricative which is how I suspect most English speakers are pronouncing Lojban <'> anyway, but that's a tricky sound cross-linguistically, isn't it. I remember some Eastern European saying on the Lojban list that he was using [G] for <'>, which I take as another indication that contrastive /h x/ is problematic.Really? [x] is hard to distinguish from [h] for English speakers?
No, e.g. /ihi/ and /ixi/ would be hard to distinguish for human beings in general.
The Lojban speakers I have heard/talked to in Lojban didn't seem to have trouble with it, and I didn't notice anything special, but of course I haven't heard everyone's Lojban by far.
I've heard barely any Lojban spoken, but my money's on /h/ and /x/ failing to cause a problem not because they're always auditorily distinct but because what with taking stress nd rhythm into account, in most environments the contrast remains to some extent, and of course pragmatic context disambiguates easily.
Still, I wouldn't mind having /x/ and /h/ be different phonemes, the latter being either <'> or <h>, while /x/ would simply be <x>, i.e. what Lojban does.
Do we know of any natlangs that contrast /ihi/ and /ixi/? Even /h/:/x/ contrasts are pretty rare. John Cowan once told me it occurs in Irish, tho I never got to see a good list of minimal pairs. In dialects of English that I know, you can in Scouse get a contrast between [bo(h)] _but_ and [box] _buck_, but only in phrase-final environments.
Is <q> really more visually appealing than <.> ? Maybe it is, but it's also much heavier on the eye.
<Q> is a letter of the roman alphabet, <.> a punctuation mark. To use letters for almost all phonemes but switch to a punctuation mark for one of them seems perverse, tho I acknowledge there is an orthographic tradition of using a 9-inverted-comma for a glottal stop.
I think as long as <'> doesn't become [?], I won't compain.
There had been a consensus for <'> being [?]! Xorban <'>, that is. There's no consensus on whether Lojban <'> has any reflex in Xorban. --And.