From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Fri Jul 07 15:19:24 2006 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Fri, 07 Jul 2006 15:19:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1Fyyf5-00048l-97 for lojban-list-real@lojban.org; Fri, 07 Jul 2006 15:19:00 -0700 Received: from phma.optus.nu ([166.82.175.165] helo=ixazon.dynip.com) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1Fyyf1-00047O-Cn for lojban-list@lojban.org; Fri, 07 Jul 2006 15:18:59 -0700 Received: from [192.168.25.19] (unknown [192.168.25.19]) by ixazon.dynip.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id F0399CE459 for ; Fri, 7 Jul 2006 18:18:39 -0400 (EDT) From: Pierre Abbat To: lojban-list@lojban.org Subject: [lojban] Re: Alphabet proposal one. Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2006 18:18:24 -0400 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.1 References: <20060707153327.57398.qmail@web81303.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <12d58c160607070930l59d5ed26kf1bb8267f38d0c20@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <12d58c160607070930l59d5ed26kf1bb8267f38d0c20@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200607071818.27616.phma@phma.optus.nu> X-Spam-Score: -2.3 (--) X-archive-position: 11967 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: phma@phma.optus.nu Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list On Friday 07 July 2006 12:30, komfo,amonan wrote: > Well, more people use the Latin alphabet than any other, I suspect. But > given Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and the South Asian languages, there's a > *lot* of folks who *don't* use it. I counted 2 billion in the language > ranking list only going down to Punjabi (no. 13). As far as the number of > *languages* go, yeah, most of our 6000 languages have, like, 4,000 speakers > & are written in the Latin alphabet by western scholars. Of the top six languages: Chinese is written in ideograms, which are also used by Japanese with the addition of kana for anything not writable in kanji. Writing Lojban in kanji would not make sense. English and Spanish use the Latin alphabet, which is also used for many other languages. Hindi uses the Nagari abugida, which is used for writing several other languages in and near India. Adapting Nagari to Lojban is doable. Russian is written in Cyrillic, which is also used for other Slavic languages and Soviet languages of a variety of families. Adapting Cyrillic to Lojban is simple and has been done. Arabic is written in the Arabic abjad, which is also used for Persian, Urdu, and a few other languages. With only three vowels, which can be long or short and are often not written, it doesn't fit Lojban well. The Turks gave it up in favor of the Latin alphabet. phma 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.