Re: 'th' and phonemes

["@morocco.eng [Doug Landauer]" <cbmvax!uunet!ENG.SUN.COM!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!Doug.Landauer>]

> Introducing 'h' for the 'th' sound would be silly.  [ ... ]  I'm not
> positive I'd accept /th/ as a phone included in 't', but that's just me.
> I would more likely consider it to be just plain outside the language ...

Here's another small bit of info that argues against including /th/ in
Lojban:  Some dialects of English use /f/ or /v/ wherever most of us
use the voiced or unvoiced /th/ sounds.  (Anyone remember the "Mother's
Lament", from an ancient Cream album (Disraeli Gears, I think)?)

> There are a zillion sounds that we could wind up adding to the Lojban
> alphabet if we wanted to include everything.  If we did, we wouldn't
> have Lojban, we'd have IPA.

Nah, we'd end up with the language that Heinlein described in his short
story "Gulf".  (I think it was called something like "Speedtalk".)
--
Doug Landauer -- landauer@eng.sun.com                     _
Sun Microsystems, Inc. -- STE, SunPro, Languages         La no ka 'oi.