Buffer vowels/aka/Allophones of zero

["61510::GILSON" <cbmvax!uunet!CCF4.NRL.NAVY.MIL!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!gilson!61510.decnet>]

Lojbab writes:

>By way of history, the choice of hyphen, and the development of hyphen/buffer
>involved a fair amount of testing, albeit only with English speakers.
>The original favored approach involved using vocalic 'r' as the hyphen, but
>I believe that a significant minority thought this ugly especially in print.
>The 'r' approach WAS retained after CVV rafsi at beginnings, and I used it
 later
>in le'avla systmeatization.  The vocalic 'r' to some people
>is the closest vowel sound to [y], of course.

>Instead people chose y=@ as preferred.  This caused other problems, including
>the fact that JCB at that time planned to use @ as the buffer.  Basically, all
>the people who wanted to speak the language overruled 'simple' design.  JCB
>tried and failed to satisfy people using the @ for both hyphen and buffer.  I
 was
>one of the opponents, and in the only contribution to the Loglan that JCB
>acknowledges, I proposed that speakers of buffered dialects would use 'iy'
 (yuh)
>for the hyphen, and speakers of unbuffered dialects would use 'uh'.  I believe
>that remains TLI design to the present.

An interesting bit of history. Obviously if I'd been there I'd have spoken up
for a different solution.

>There is no sentiment among the design team to even consider a change until
>such a speaker shows up and is interacted with for a while.  The strong
>sentiment in the Lojban community for stability in baselines makes any
>discussion of phonology changes beyond stylistic ones in how we teach the
>language academic.

This is obviously important to the current Lojban community. In fact, it is
this desire for stability in Lojban that I found so frustrating, since it looks
to me that Lojban crystallized too soon. But I have to accept that I can't
change that, and that is why I choose to be a peripheral observer on the Lojban
scene rather than really active. I find the whole project interesting, and I
intend to remain in touch (and to send LLG some more money when my own finances
are a bit freer) while devoting more of my own efforts to the Language X scheme,
where I can more readily help direct the progress of development.

It may be noted that in LX I had originally proposed a schwa allophone of zero,
and allowing consonant clusters without restriction, to be buffered by schwa
whenever a speaker had difficulty, but I was overruled by a majority vote. I
still think that it was a good idea, but at least there was a free and open
discussion there.

                                                   Bruce