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Mike S., On 17/09/2012 06:07:
- Tones need vowels, mainly. Xorban formally pretends that predicate stems don't have vowels,
Yes and no. /@/ in the environment C@C doesn't count as a "V" for Xorban's morphological rules, but that doesn't mean that at a phonological level stems don't have vowels.
and lots of times they actually don't. So no matter how you slice and dice the "words", all the distinctions that tones could make right now would effectively be among closed class morphemes i.e. variables and operators. We don't really need to do that, precisely because they are closed class. In other words Xorban as it stands is a poor candidate for tonalization AFAICT.
I don't see a problem here. Ifonly word-final vowel-sequences bear low tone, then /@/ in the environment C@C will always bear high tone, i.e. will never be tonally contrastive.
- If we wanted to put vowels back in Xorban predicate stems, then we would have a good reason for tonalization.
Rather, the tone system would make it possible to rethink the morphological rules for phonological patterns within words. I've snipped your suggestions for what the patterns could be. I have my own (inchoate) ideas, too. But is it worth the effort of exploring them if the consensus is that tone gets the thumbs down? But I do think we should be thinking about the issue of tone before investing too much effort in working on the current morphology that's based on toneless phonology.
What is the phonological value of <h>, which I have been using experimentally?Nothing but [x, h] makes any sense.No phonemic contrast, but either phonetic realization for what would conventionally be spelled <h>.
Yes.
<x, q> for /G, ?/ is less weird than <'> for /h/. Also less unwarranted. IMVHO they're all weird.
<'> has the additional weirdness of not being a letter, tho ther's orthographic precedent of it representing a schwa interconsonantally and [?].
As far as /w y/ which slightly confusingly are [y 9] as in Loglan, although I know one is going to agree with this, I would use them in stems in the following way. stem := (y) root (y root)* root := C (w) C ( (w) C )* /y/ would not be elidable,A stem would begin with unelidable /9/? That <y> would be elided if the onset were pronounceable, or if preceded by another word, and it wouldn't have to be spelled either way.
You could also have roots consisting of wC, where the initial w is obligatorily deleted following a vowel.
The way I look at it, the reason that most of them start with the glottal stop follows from a more general rule that all syllables start with a non-null onset.Wouldn't it be more meaningful to say "the reason that all of them start with a consonant follow from a more general rule that all words start with a consonant"? Or would you rather not consider /./ a consonant? I think the intent of Lojban .uV, .iV is that the onset be .u, .i and the nucleus be the V, so the /./ isn't necessarily filling an otherwise empty onset -- tho if V are always nuclei then your formulation works. I think that Lojban's intent is made clear by things such as forms like <ia> being called "diphthongs", semivowels being spelled the same way as vowels, and semivowels not counting as consonants for the purpose of defining brivla boundaries. (Granted there are no rafsi like "kua" without the apostrophe to test this, but if there were, then my understanding is that they would be treated like CVV and not CCV; cf. "tai", not analyzed as CVC.)
Your arguments make sense. The specification of Lojban is too incomplete to really resolve the question. One unexplored possibility is that i,u are both consonants and vowels and some generalizations ostensibly pertaining to consonants or vowels should in fact be recast as generalizations pertaining to nonvowels or nonconsonants. I'm not proposing we have that discussion. One of the things that some people like about Lojban and some people (such as me) hate is that there is no scope for completing the specification in areas where it is incomplete or for revising it in areas where it is incoherent. I wasted too many years behaving as it that was not the case, tho the effort had some kind of moral value, I think. --And.