Slavic vowels/ response to Ivan

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

Ivan Derzhanski says:
>Still, I have to declare, on behalf of the entire body of Slavic-
>tongued people, that while we have some sympathy for those who have
>trouble pronouncing word-initial /ml/ (a cluster we take for granted),
>we will have to undergo some special training to learn to distinguish
>/I/ from /i/.  I personally can't tell them apart, all my linguistic
>training nonwithstanding.

I've never been a master of IPA symbols, or Cyrillic, or their ASCII
representation.  There is a Cyrillic letter that looks like a backwards
N, and another that looks like the two lower-case letters "bi" written
close together.  Is there no phonemic distinction between the sounds for
these two letters?  If I am correct as to what these sound like, if I
were speaking to you in Lojban, I would try to use the former for my
Lojban 'i' and the latter would probably come fairly close to my buffer.

Are we misusing our terms for describing these two Lojban sounds?  Any
suggestions on how we can be clearer?

Note that the definition of the buffer is that it has to be
distinguishable or filterable to/by the listener.  It would be 'bad
form' for me talking to a Slavic speaker to use two sounds not
distinguishable.  On the other hand, Lojban has a relatively small
number of vowel phonemes, and most people can distinguish some phones
that have no true phonemic distinction for them.  I find it hard to
believe that a speaker of a buffered dialect will have trouble finding a
sound in his inventory of unique phones that a given listener cannot
distinguish.  This is one reason for keeping the buffer sound undefined.
If my listener cannot understand me, I am forced to choose another
sound, and by maximizing the distance between vowel phonemes, we leave a
fair amount of room between them to squeeze in another somewhere that
works pragmatically.  The buffer is after all designed to recognize and
solve a pragmatic problem for communciation between non-native speakers.
Presumably a native Lojban speaker would NOT speak a buffered dialect.

lojbab