The Complete Lojban Language
Syllables with syllabic consonants and no vowel are never stressed or counted when determining which syllables to stress (see Section 3.9 (p. 42)).
3.5 Vowel Pairs
Lojban vowels also occur in pairs, where each vowel sound is in a separate syllable. These two vowel sounds are connected (and separated) by an apostrophe. Lojban vowel pairs should be pronounced continuously with the [h] sound between (and not by a glottal stop or pause, which would split the two vowels into separate words).
All vowel combinations are permitted in two-syllable pairs with the apostrophe separating them; this includes those which constitute diphthongs when the apostrophe is not included.
The Lojban vowel pairs are:
a'a a'e a'i a'o a'u a'y e'a e'e e'i e'o e'u e'y i'a i'e i'i i'o i'u i'y o'a o'e o'i o'o o'u o'y u'a u'e u'i u'o u'u u'y y'a y'e y'i y'o y'u y'y
Vowel pairs involving y appear only in Lojbanized names. They could appear in cmavo (structure words), but only .y'y. is so used – it is the Lojban name of the apostrophe letter (see Section 17.2 (p. 398)).
When more than two vowels occur together in Lojban, the normal pronunciation pairs vowels from the left into syllables, as in the Lojbanized name:
- Example 3.6
- meiin.
- mei,in.
Example 3.6 (p. 38) contains the diphthong ei followed by the vowel i. In order to indicate a different grouping, the comma must always be used, leading to:
- Example 3.7
- me,iin.
which contains the vowel e followed by the diphthong ii. In rough English representation, Example 3.6 (p. 38) is “May Een”, whereas Example 3.7 (p. 38) is “Meh Yeen”.
3.6 Consonant Clusters
A consonant sound is a relatively brief speech-sound that precedes or follows a vowel sound in a syllable; its presence either preceding or following does not add to the count of syllables, nor is a consonant required in either position for any syllable. Lojban has seventeen consonants: for the purposes of this section, the apostrophe is not counted as a consonant.
An important distinction dividing Lojban consonants is that of voicing. The following table shows the unvoiced consonants and the corresponding voiced ones:
UNVOICED VOICED p b t d k g f v c j s z x -
The consonant x has no voiced counterpart in Lojban. The remaining consonants, l, m, n, and r, are typically pronounced with voice, but can be pronounced unvoiced.
