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( [70.224.74.45]) by mx.gmail.com with ESMTP id y21sm950688pyd.2006.07.01.10.48.41; Sat, 01 Jul 2006 10:48:41 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <44A6B4D0.5070709@gmail.com> Date: Sat, 01 Jul 2006 13:45:52 -0400 From: Hugh O'Byrne User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 (Windows/20050923) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-list@lojban.org Subject: [lojban] Re: [hobyrne@gmail.com: Alphabet] References: <20060701011144.83985.qmail@web81309.mail.mud.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <20060701011144.83985.qmail@web81309.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Score: -2.4 (--) X-archive-position: 11863 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: hobyrne@gmail.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list John E Clifford wrote: > Nah! The wikipedia contains a contemporary review which still applies nearly 150 years later. > The analysis is faulty (though Bell Jr corrected some of it).The so-called representationalism is > largely arbitrary -- better than the Just-So stories but nothing to help a trained articulatory > phonologist. Granted, the representationalism in the symbols *is* fairly arbitrary at its lowest level, as are the modifiers to those symbols. But the compound symbols (which are most of the letters) are consistent, logical applications of those modifiers to the base symbols. As such, it is clearly superior to the Latin alphabet in that respect. And consistency and logic are respects that are valued highly in Lojbanistan, as I understand. And VS is *considerably* better than the Just-So stories alphabet. There's hardly a comparison. In the story, there are very few modifiers to existing symbols, mostly new made-up symbols even where there were parallels to previous sounds to guide in consistent creation of new symbols. And what modifiers there are, aren't even applied in consistent ways. VS is *very* different from that. "... nothing to help a trained articulatory phonologist". Is that the target audience of Lojban? Or, putting that idea on its head, do you think a trained articulatory phonologist has nothing to contribute to improving the design of an artificial spoken language? I, obviously, think that they could contribute. I think we should take advantage of the insights of such people. In this respect, Lojban will not educate a linguist, but an educated linguist can help in the formulation of Lojban. > And (not mentioned) the fact that similar sounds are represented by similar > characters merely carries over into writing the common confusions in speech (not a desirable > written-spoken isomorphism). I did mention it in my original post, or at least I tried to, with my 'b' 'd' 'g' example. I'm not sure I agree. I'd be interested to hear more about how you come to this conclusion. Written-spoken isomorphism is *very* desirable. It's the very reason Lojban has a phonemic alphabet. It is desirable to as much and as precise a degree as possible. Confusions occur both in speech and text. Would it be better for these confusions to be unrelated, independent? Put it this way: If you see a word that is obviously misspelled, what do you do? You vocalize it in your mind, think ov words that sound the same, and see if they fit into the sentence properly. You go from the visual to the auditory world. Phonemic spelling makes that transition easier. But VS makes the transition entirely unnecessary: a misspelling of that nature in VS can be analyzed in that fashion entirely in the visual world. Assuming you're not deaf, maybe not a big deal to you, 'v' and 'f' being very different symbols are still closely related in your mind, but perhaps to a deaf person, having the symbols for 'v' and 'f' be similar as the sounds are similar might make the job a bit easier. In fact, changing 'of' to 'ov' brings up so many more issues than just that, so it's probably not as good an example as I'd like it to be. But it demonstrates a transition from the visual to the auditory that can be done away with using VS. Further, when reading a handwritten page, the mind automatically fills in meaning where there are smudges, or slightly askew lines, stuff like that. That very same mechanism will work in favour of making slight transcription errors more easily understandable. There are some fun jokes that involve expressing visual puns verbally, or more commonly, verbal puns visually. They're so much fun because they're delayed-reaction jokes, it takes a second (or a day) to 'get' it. VS will pretty much kill those kinds of jokes. What is a verbal pun, is a visual pun (or is more likely to be perceived as bad transcription). I enjoy those jokes. But they are, fundamentally, misunderstandings and misrepresentations. They don't belong in Lojban. > And it turns out that even more characters are only minutely > different than there are easily confused sounds. This is true. It is a weakness of VS. Mark E. Shoulson has pointed me to the Lhoerr alphabet, it seems to be far superior in that respect. I may change the direction of my crusade, from VS to Lhoerr. For now, the very name Visual Speech expresses the idea I'm championing, so I'll use it as a token of my goal, though it may not be the actual destination. > And to no point: Lojban (nor English) doesn't > need a way to represent every conceivable human sound, just a consistent way to represent the ones > in the language Which is why I suggested only a subset of the alphabet may be all that's required, or even desired. As to *need*: The Latin alphabet *is* all you need to represent Lojban, it's true. And it has the dubious advantage of being familiar to many people in the world (more on that later). But then, English is all you *need* for anything you'd want to say in Lojban, and it is also familiar to many people in the world. Lojban is not about stopping at mere need, otherwise it wouldn't exist. No, Lojban doesn't *need* VS. The world doesn't need Lojban. But the world *has* Lojban, because people were (and still are) enamoured with ideas such as creating a useful, culture-neutral communication system. I think we can all agree that the world is a better place (at least a more fun place, or a more mentally stimulating place, for us personally) for having Lojban. I happen to think Lojban would be a better language for having an alphabet such as VS (or Lhoerr). I'm not interested in Lojban because of *need*. I think it's *fun*! As to 'a consistent way to represent the [sounds] in the language": VS is a symbol set that has a couple of *levels* of consistency, _within_ its representations of sounds, whereas the current Lojban alphabet is just a set with no more meaning or depth than its superficial arbitrary definition. VS is simply better at *being* 'a consistent way to represent sounds'. The Latin alphabet is only barely adequate, its only claim to being anything more than completely arbitrary is its 'familiarity' to a large portion of the world, which I address in another post. I prefer a usefully structured, tiered system over an arbitrary, flat one. > (and English doesn't even want that, since, like Chinese, it is probably more > important that all English speakers spell things pretty much the same way than that they spell > 'em like they say 'em -- or we reproduce another kind of spoken mess). Irrelavent to the subject at hand. > To be sure, the Latin > alphabet could be improved for various purposes -- make characters more different, for example -- > but this is not the way to go. This is actually the kind of thinking that first intrigued me, and led me to discover such things as linguistics, the IPA, and Lojban. I agree that modifying an existing set of symbols is not the way to go. A fresh start is needed. Lojban appeared to me like fresh enough ground that the idea of an improved alphabet might take root. Perhaps I'm just too late - I should have put this idea in at the very beginning of the Lojban project, except I didn't even know about it (or VS) at that time. Has Lojbanistan ground gotten so stale already? mi'e .xius. To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.