Re: TECH.QUERY *mexco

[VILVA@VIIKKI21.HELSINKI.FI]

> Date:          Thu, 17 Jun 1993 01:59:11 EDT
> From:          Logical Language Group <lojbab%GREBYN.COM@FINHUTC.hut.fi>
> Subject:       Re: TECH.QUERY *mexco

> Veijo wants attitudinal's.
>
> .uaro'ero'o.ianaicaise'i ba'anai la noras .e'ecai joi .i'i mi
.....
> zo'onai
>

   It seems I asked for that :-) (though I tried to avoid stacked
   UIs to ease the grokking)

> change.  We could optionally change the morphology rules to make xc
> permissible arguing on the grounds that no one has noticed that the word
> wasn't sayable yet, so it must really be sayable.

  I personally have had no special trouble in pronouncing mexco,
  perhaps due to my past elementary studies of Russian.

> The rationale for
> forbidding the cluster is the likelihood that speakers or listeners will
> confuse xc with kc, especially given that large numbers of the speaker
> base have trouble with 'x' in the first place.  (I also note that my son,
> who is a native speaker of a language with an 'x', often pronounces it
> such that I can't tell it from a 'k'.)

  It isn't necessarily a question of the production of the sound.
  Finnish has no native 'b' and consequently we have minimal need
  to discriminate between 'b' and 'p'. If I am not attentive, I
  hear a large portion of foreign 'b' sounds as p's. For most
  Finns it is very difficult to consistently produce and recognize
  b's. A word like 'pagbu' is an abomination which most likely will
  be pronounced as 'pakpu' by the man of the street (or as any one of
  the 7 other possible variants). The Russian set of fricatives
  would be a cause for nightmares for many people.

> We can change the gismu, but to minimize impact, we would have to
> preserve the assigned 'mex' rafsi.  The constraints on 'x' clusters
> doesn't give us a lot of choice.  It seems most logical to change the
> 'c' to one of the four 'easy' consonants:  l/m/n/r, giving mexlo, mexmo,
> mexno, or mexro.  Of these, Cowan favors mexro, though it does make it
> closer to merko (but then it has been close enough to get confused with
> mekso, and an 'r' would help there.  Nora and I find this acceptable.
> Any one else have an opinion?

     Actually I found 'mexro' slightly more difficult than the
     original. We don't have any Japanese Lojbanists yet but many
     Japanese people I have known have had difficulties in
     producing a sound which I could recognize as an 'r' (the
     same goes for 'l') and quite many of them have had
     difficulties with consonant clusters in general. So I'd
     think both 'mexro' and 'mexlo' might cause trouble (on the
     other hand, our Japanese friends will have trouble with a
     large portion of the gismu list anyhow).
     After 'tasting' different variants I found 'mexmo', 'mexno'
     and 'mexto' reasonable though not necessarily actually better
     than the original.

     The original 'mexco'  is a good word for pronounciation
     drills, especially coupled with 'mekco', 'mekso' and 'mexso'.
     Trying out also the disallowed combinations might help
     people to recognize the reasons for difficulties they may
     be experiencing even with some of the legal combinations
     and also with the 'alien' x.

         co'o mi'e veion

------------------------------------------------------------------

 Veijo Vilva       vilva@viikki21.helsinki.fi