responding to And on structure

[Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!GREBYN.COM!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!lojbab>]

I just don;t buy this concept of Lojban as a CV only language.

First of all, to make this assumption, you have to presume that the base form
has the buffers added in, and that they are being elided when you don;t
need them.

This could ONLY be true to a 'descriptive' analysis, one of the 'competence'
of a Lojbanist who spoke a fully buffered dialect.

There are no speakers of fully buffered dialects, and I doubt that anyone
who listens to someone else speak psychologically inserts such buffer sounds.

The morphology of the language is defined in terms of word and syllable
structure, and the consonant clusters play a significant role in recognizing
the words you hear by word type.  So both 'production' and 'recognition'
do not consider the buffer to break up the consonant cluster.

The concept of the buffer is specifically that it be psychologically ignored
- that it be unrecognized as a 'sound' in the language, in the same way that
we don't really notice various 'grunts' ,and 'uhs' and 'ers' in people's
English speech as being sounds and words.  I don;t know much about phonological
and morphological theories, but I doubt that any of them define English as
having an "uh", "er", or "youknow" as alternate values for a phoneme that may
 no indeed DOES, exist between every syllable, and is optionally omitted
whenever the speaker of the language doesn;t feel a need to use it.  If we
recognize these sounds at all, it is only by the presence in an extreme or
otherwise unusual frequency or pattern.  I suspect that the buffered dialects
will be considered equally unusual or extreme - the difference with Lojban
being that, since we have defined this as a 'permitted' deviation from
normal use that doesn't affect ambiguity, it will be less likely that buffered
dialects will be attached with a derogative stigma.

The unwillingness to assign a specific phonetic value to the buffer 'phoneme'
should further clarify it as an abnormality, and not a preferred usage.

Perhaps anopther comparison might be the option that allows Esperanto to drop
the final "o" (which is replaced by an apostrophe in print, I think) in nouns.
I may be mistating the generality of this as a permitted usage, but surely no
one would argue that the form without the "o" is more basic than the version
with the "o":  even if it were ubiqitously done this way, the penultimate
stress rules and other morphological patterns of E. presume that nouns hav e
the "o", and I am given to understand that the stress is not changed when
the "o" is elided.

There is one other facet in this - since Lojban speech is audio-visually
isomorphic, any 'real' sound would also appear in writing.  The buffer sound,
if audible, is not written.  There is no symbol for it - by definition it is
NOT a phoneme of the language.

And has argued (perhaps privately) that all langauages map vowel space to
some phoneme so that it is fallacious to claim that there can be a 'non-Lojban'
vowel sound.  But I know of few people who would consider [y] as mapping to
any Englsh phoneme - if we hear it, we mark it as a foreign dialect.  On the
rare occasions where someone's dialect DOES map [y] in speech to some other
phoneme, we certainly recognize it as being specifically a feature of that
speaker, much as we may be able to hear and repair the results of a speech
impediment like lisping.

I did not argue this theory of And's before. because I recognize that
linguists often pose descriptive theories that may produce valid predictions
about a language, even though that theory has nothing to do with how the
language really works in the minds of speakers and listeners.  I see no
logical or theoretical benefit to this theory other than the lukewarm
claim that it makes the language ultimately simple.  I'd like people to
think Lojban is simple, but not through tricky definitions of its structure