when are pauses mandatory

From Lojban
Revision as of 11:45, 23 March 2014 by Gleki (talk | contribs) (Text replace - "jbocre: d" to "d")
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Lojban's insistence on self-segmenting morphophonology entails a few places in which pauses are mandatory. The pauses may be written with a period (see denpa bu), but the writing of the period is not mandatory, even when the pause is. Note that pause does not equal glottal stop: a glottal stop is considered an instance of pause, but not all pauses have glottal stops.

Here are the places where a pause is required:

  1. Before all words starting with a vowel.
  1. After all cmene (words ending in a consonant).
  1. Before all cmene unless preceded by la/lai/doi (a particular instance would be after COI words)
  1. After all words ending in -y (lerfu words) unless followed by another lerfu word (also ending in -y). (note that this combines with the first rule to require .y. and .y'y. to have pauses on both sides... unless followed by a lerfu word, I suppose.)
  1. After the opening delimiter word, and before the close delimiter word, of la'o/zoi quotes.
  1. After stressed cmavo, when followed by a brivla. (stress in cmavo is normally free, but cmavo in front of brivla are not to be stressed, unless there is a pause, or else we can't divide the words right)
    • The pause is not required when the brivla begins with a stressed syllable. If it is longer, it may be. {LEselDENpa} doesn't need a pause but {LE.kraTAIgo} does.

Is that it? --mi'e .mark.

By "required", do you mean "needed in all situations" or "required by rule"? If the former, then item 4 on lerfu words is not necessarily true (cy at the beginning of utterance or with enough cmavo around it should be fine). If the latter, then the subcomment under 6 about LEselDENpa is out of order since the rule says pause is necessary anyway. -- mi'e Nora LeChevalier oras.