Re: lojban phonology

[jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU]

Philip Delaquess <delaques@GCG.COM> writes:
> ...Suppose somebody reads the following in a slow monotone:
>
>         i mi fi do ca cusku fe ...
>
> What prevents the listener from hearing this?
>
>         i mi fi do ca cu skufe ...
>
> What is the role of spaces and newlines in Lojban text?
> Are they ever either mandatory or illegal?

In audible speech you would hear this, representing stress by upper case:

        .imifidocacUskufe ...

According to the morphology rules, each V and CV syllable (also CVV but
more complicated) is a separate cmavo if it isn't the last syllable of
a brivla.  The stressed syllable {cUs} -- the only one in this text --
signals the next to last syllable of a brivla, which in this case has
only two syllables.  Then the following {ku} is part of the brivla,
after which {fe} is again a separate cmavo.

You have to mark stress or put in whitespace (or both, though nobody
does it).  Stress rules like this are common in natural languages for
marking word boundaries.  There's a paper on this though I don't have
the filename at the tip of my tongue -- ftp://ftp.cs.yale.edu/pub/lojban/

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