Re: th in Lojban

["Arthur W. Protin Jr." (GC-ACCURATE) <cbmvax!uunet!PICA.ARMY.MIL!protin>]

Folks,
    (Same as it ever was, I try to keep quiet but something always
drives me to post.)
    I had a problem with the loss of 'th' 18 years ago.  I resolved
it then.  My understanding of the situation is, regretable at odds
with lojbab's:
> In Lojban, 't' represents the English 't' and 'th' of korant's
> name - he could presumably even pronounc his 't's as 'th'.
My position is that the letter 't' in lojban has only the 't' sound!
The 'th' sound is a consonant pair.  Thus, the question becomes
what consonant provides the continuing sound (I cannot remember the 
words to technically describe the sound catagories.  There are
the stops 'dptb' and the continueing sounds 'mnlrscxfv'.)
I find that the closest thing to the 'th' sound are the consonant
pairs 'ts' and 'tx' where most uses I heard I would write as the
former.  Eg., Ruts, Bets, Korants, and Artsur .  I would probably
treat "Beth" as "Bess".  

    Since lojban does not has an official 'th' sound, I would naturally
treat it as a lisp and try to correct for that failing.  Thus, unless
there was some emphasis on the initial stop or other sound hint to 
aid in the correction, we will have to assume that 'th' is just an 's'.

    If lojban accepts the 'th' as an alternative for the 't', then one
of the most common speech defects introduces ambiguity into the language.

    thats the way I see it,
    Art


Arthur Protin <protin@pica.army.mil>
These are my personal views and do not reflect those of my boss
or this installation.