Re: Allophones of zero in Lojban

[And Rosta <cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!ucleaar>]

Mark:
> I don't know.  On the one hand, the "y" and the buffer vowel (and for that
> matter, laxly-pronounced "a"'s) are just too likely to get confused.  And,
> as And said, "y" is a very reasonable choice for a buffer vowel.  On the
> other hand, I can't come up with a pretty way to do away with the function
> of "y" in morphology (cf. my "bastrapli/bastyrapli" example).  Personally,
> if it weren't such a big change in the way things are done and such a
> hassle on phoneticization of cmene and the like, I'd almost rather see
> keeping everything as it stands, but allowing (mandating?) schwa as buffer
> vowel and changing the pronunciation of "y" to "\"u" (u-umlaut).  Yeah,
> it's kind of Volap"ukian, but it's certainly recognizable as different from
> everything else, feels like a good "hyphen" sound to me, and even makes
> decent hesitation noise (try it!).

I regard Mark's suggestion as the optimal solution. It's also rather nice
in that then all the vowel symbols would roughly correspond to the
IPA symbols.

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.

What I suggested was that *the syllabic positions* for buffer vowels be
underlyingly present. The buffer vowel could then be associated with any
empty position, or the position could be left empty.

This could be true of any accent of Lojban.

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

That doesn't mean that they don't know that the buffer vowel could surface
at particular points in the phonological string.

> 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.

Under my analysis a cluster consists of two consonants separated by an
underlyingly empty V slot.

> 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.

Yes, the buffer is ignored in that we needn't be conscious of it: its presence
or absence has no significance. But the buffer vowel can be inserted only
at particular positions in the phonological string: its insertion is rule
governed, & these rules must be represented psychologically - at least by
anyone who uses any buffer vowels.

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

But is it a dispreferred usage? I think use of the buffer (at least if had
some standard realization, such as schwa) would make for greater clarity.
Furthermore, it seems odd to give the language features which, because
they are dispreferred, are deliberately designed badly.

> 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.

This is very different. Firstly, if not all words ending in /o/ can lose
the /o/ then the rule must be a lexically specific rule of deletion.
Secondly, a rule of o-insertion lacks motivation: why /o/? why not /e/?
The Lojban buffer vowel as presently defined, or defined as [@], can
be thought of as an unmarked vowel & therefore a candidate for insertion.

> 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.

It may not be a lerfu, or the approximate Lojban equivalent of phoneme, but
in no phonological theory is there being a graphical symbol for some
sound a necessary and sufficient condition for that sound being a phoneme.
In traditional phonemic analysis I guess the buffer vowel would tend to
be analysed as a phoneme (which happens to be prone to deletion).

> 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 argued that hearers try to map any phone onto some phoneme. So unless the
buffer vowel is very very different from the six Lojban vowels it will
get mapped onto one of them. So, if someone speaking English uses [y]
(a.k.a. "u-umlaut"), I will first of all try to map it onto /u:/. So
on hearing [byt] I'd guess _boot_ was intended.

> 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

Some theories care about psychological reality and some don't.
I have posted my analysis usually in contexts in which the weird &
wonderful consonant clusters of Lojban are being discussed, usually
negatively, in an effort to point out that they don't exist underlyingly.
For example, _mlatu_ is not dissimilar to _Malaysia_, since the latter
can be [m@leiZ@] or [mleiZ@], yet one doesn't hear complaints
about a word-inital /ml/ cluster in English.

---
And.