On Jan 17, 2008, at 12:58 AM, Alex Martini wrote:
Both of the above are essentially correct. y'y (the apostrophe
letter) is pronounced as a consonant by most speakers. And it is a
special sound in Lojban.
Let's pull out the long linguistics words now. Phonotactics: the
allowed sound combinations in a given language. For example, English
would allow the nonsense word "feep" and "lek", but not "pferd" or
"rmla". As a speaker of English, the rules for allowed sounds and
clusters etc is subconscious.
In Lojban, these rules are actually written out. The y'y is only
allowed *between vowels*. This is part of the phonotactics of
Lojban. There are other things, such as disallowed consonant pairs
as well. (I think "sv" is an example). Sure it might be useful to
have y'y in other places, but we can't because of how Lojban is
defined. I should try to dig up where in CLL the phonotactic rules
are set out. I'd guess in the chapter titled "The Hills are Alive
with the Sounds of Lojban"...
Going back to English, think of the 'h' and 'ng' sounds. The 'h'
can't come anywhere but the start of a syllable, and almost always
the start of a word. And opposite for 'ng' -- only the end of a
syllable. Why can't you have words pronounced like like "nga" or
"mih" in English? Because the phonotactics don't allow it. So it's
not really that strange that Lojban has sounds which are only
allowed in certain positions either.
And yet, if my name was Pferd or Nga, That's how I would spell it in
English, and English-speakers would do their best to pronounce it (and
fail miserably - I've heard all kinds of weird variations of my own
name when I was is the US)
There are after all people in the US with names like Pfeifer and
Nguyen. There's good reason to set aside phonotactics rules for names.
I agree that this has no place in cmavo or selbri, but in names I
think the restrictions should be fewer.
mi'e ioav
