Lojban Phonology

[cbmvax!uunet!venus.ycc.yale.edu!LEVY]

I am a graduate student doing a dissertation in phonetics and phonology,
and I'm a newcomer to Lojban.  I have been very impressed by the
quality and sophistication of the teaching materials, and I have begun
trying to learn the language.  I have one question so far:

Why is it that Lojban has so many consonant clusters?  The general form
of polysyllablic words (especially selbri) seems to be CVCCV.  This is
especially surprising to me, since (1) There have been repeated references
to Lojban as a "vowel-rich" language, (2) There was some mention of the
language moving toward syllable timing, which would be unusual in a language
with so many syllable-final consonants (syllable-timed languages tend to
favor open syllables), and (3) If one wants to use Lojban for spoken
communication with computers (one of my main interests), having syllable-
final consonants only makes things difficult.

Given that Lojban has 6 vowels and 12 consonants, the number of possible
CV syllables is 6*12 = 72.  Therefore, the number of possible two-syllable
words is 72*72, or 5184.

Perhaps the goal is to distinguish selbri from sumti, since sumti seem
to be CV syllables for the most part.

Any comments?


Thanks,
saimyn