Lojban Pronunciation

Lojban itself is pronounced LOZH-bahn (with the zh like the s in leisure, and the o as in boat.)

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The Lojban ASCII orthography:

a = [see note 1]

b = b as in boat

c = sh as in shop

d = d as in dog

e = e as in bet

f = f as in off

g = g as in got

i = ee as in peek

j = s as in measure

k = c as in cut

l = l as in loot

m = m as in moat

n = n as in not

o = [see note 2]

p = p as in pet

r = r as in rot (may be trilled)

s = s as in seek

t = t as in taut

u = u as in flute

v = v as in vail

x = (non-english sound, voiced velar fricative, try ch as in Bach or loch. if you can't, try it farther forward in the mouth)

y = u as in putt, IPA @, a.k.a. schwa (a as in about might be a better example)

z = z as in zoo

' = h as in ha (standard lojban, I prefer th as in tooth)

. = glottal stop, try hawai'ian `. (or the pause in the middle of "Uh-oh")

, = syllable break

Note 1: "a" has a preferred and an allowed variant form. The preferred form does not occur in GA, but sounds somewhat like the "ar" of "park", as spoken in RP or New England American. The allowed variant form is the "a" of GA "father". It is discouraged because GA speakers often allow this vowel to relax into a schwa when unstressed (e.g. "about" and "sofa"). Note that the "a" in "cat" is not an acceptable sound for "a". [see note 3]

Note 2: The preferred form of "o" does not occur in English. The French "haute" and Spanish "como" both contain it. The nearest GA equivalent is the "o" of "dough" or "joke", but without any off-glide (w sound). RP speakers may have trouble with this sound. An allowed variant (especially before "r") is a shortened form of the "aw" in GA "dawn" (or the "o" in "Don"). RP speakers will find this in the "o" of "hot". [see note 3]

Note 3: These explanations are taken wholesale from The Complete Lojban Language. I recommend you see Chapter 3 of it for more detailed explanations. GA = General American dialect, RP = Received Pronounciation of (British) English.

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Q: No h, no q, no w?

A: No, those letters aren't used. Some use h instead of the apostrophe, because they think it looks better or because a computer won't take an apostrophe, but the standard is the apostrophe.

A: "q" is ambiguous, and "w" is subsumed into the diphthongs. (Perhaps someone should include those?) The phonemes /k/ and /q/ are both spelled as k, and q as in /kw/ is spelled as k then a dipthong beginning with u

What do you mean by /q/, a rounded /k/ or something else?

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Here are the dipthongs:

When exactly one of two consecutive vowels is "i" or "u", it becomes a glide, equivalent to English "y" and "w" respectively. For example, "vau" is pronounced similarly to English "vow". If each of the vowels is "i" or "u", the first one becomes the glide, i.e. "iu" is pronounced like "you" and "ui" like "we". If no such combination arises, there is no dipthong, and each vowel must be sounded separately (this is rarely seen because lojban uses the ' as a separator in most of these cases).

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LojbanLanguage