WikiDiscuss

John E Clifford scripsit:

> Why is {ou} not allowed? I suspect the answer is
> that somepeople can't distinguish between it and
> {o} but that doesn't seem to be a very good
> reason, since it suggests that some people
> mispronounce {o} (as I know that Lojbab with his
> diminished vowel set does).

Essentially all Americans pronounce long "o" as in "so" as ou, so we ban it.
(In British English it's @u, more or less "yu" in Lojban orthography.)

> Does the restriction on {ntc/nts/ndj/ndz} mean
> that NONE of them can occur?

Correct. The point is that nc and ntc, ns and nts, ndj and nj, ndz and nz
are too easily confused by anglophones, so we ban the first of each pair.
We probably should have added mps to this list, as illustrated by words
like "Hampshire", "Thompson", "glimpse"; mpz isn't a problem because mz
is already banned for idiosyncratic JCB reasons.

--
Henry S. Thompson said, / "Syntactic, structural, John Cowan
Value constraints we / Express on the fly." jcowan@reutershealth.com
Simon St. Laurent: "Your / Incomprehensible http://www.reutershealth.com
Abracadabralike / schemas must die!" http://www.ccil.org/~cowan