th in Lojban

[lojbab (Bob LeChevalier)]

>and if my name were Ruth or Beth, I'd want it even more.
This is an argument for including every phoneme in the world's phonetic stock.
None of the other 6 languages have 'th' and wouldn;t necessarily recognize it
as a distince sound (Hindi as an aspirated t 'th' that we would not recognize
as that sound)
By comparison, 'x' is found in 4 of the other languages, and ifor Arabic
effectively represents 3 different sounds like you suggest 'th' could
represent 2.  In Lojban, 't' represents the English 't' and 'th' of korant's
name - he could presumably even pronounc his 't's as 'th'.  'd' reprsents the
sound of 'th' in 'the' as well as 'd' in 'dog'.  
'n' represents both /n/ and /ng/, which are quite distinct in Chinese, and 
significantly so in far more cases than English distinguishes 't' from 'th'
since nearly every syllable that ends in a consoanant ends in one of the two.
They have far more call to demand 'ng' as a consonant than English speakers
have to call for 'th' which is also in only one language.  Remember that if
anything, the language is already biased towards English speakers in innumerablly
many ways.

And why do you find the 'th' such a pressing need, korant.  You have equal call
to ask for a separate vowel for what the 'a' stands for in your English name.
Indeed,about half of Lojban speakers Lojbanize the sound as 'e' so it doesn't
even have an unambiguous conversion, as 'th' does.

lojbab