jack (05/10/83)
Since I am communicating to you without voice, if I'm to give
any examples, I must first address the written language, so
you will know how to pronounce the examples.
Loglan is supposed to have written-spoken isomorphism. For
each spoken phoneme, there is one letter and vice versa.
Fortunately for us who communicate with keyboards, the Loglan
alphabet is a subset of the Roman alphabet.
There are only five vowel sounds. They are far apart enough
that a listener is unlikely to confuse them even if the
speaker has a national accent.
a as in "father"
e as in "met"
i as in "machine"
o the first of the two vowel sounds in "note".
English speakers think of the "o" in "note" as
representing one sound, but many of us (probably
particularly Americans) always utter two sounds run
together in "note", "no", "low", "row", "rope",
etc. "Note" in Loglan phonetics is "nout". The
Loglan "o" is close to the trailing sound of "law".
u as in "blue"
The following consonants have the same value in Loglan as in
English: b, d, f, g (hard), k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, and z.
The consonants that represent different sounds in Loglan and
English are c and j. C is the initial sound of "sheep". A
loglanist transcribing English sounds into Loglan phonetic
writing would write "cip" for "sheep" and "tcip" for "cheap"
("cip" and "tcip" are not Loglan words (except perhaps as
proper names)). J is the "zh" sound in "azure", "garage". J
in written English usually stands for the two sounds rendered
in Loglan writing "dj".
In 1975, Loglan used all the Roman letters except x, y, w, h,
and q. When books on Loglan are published again (any year
now, I expect), we will surely see the letter h in use, with
about the same sound as in English (aspirating the following
vowel) (at least as an acceptable allophone).
Jack Waugh
Reston, Va.
{seismo | allegra | lime | mcnc | we13 | brl-bmd}!rlgvax!jack