From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Sat Jul 08 06:19:03 2006 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Sat, 08 Jul 2006 06:19:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1FzChd-0000Au-RU for lojban-list-real@lojban.org; Sat, 08 Jul 2006 06:18:34 -0700 Received: from web81304.mail.mud.yahoo.com ([68.142.199.120]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with smtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1FzCha-0000Am-Cr for lojban-list@lojban.org; Sat, 08 Jul 2006 06:18:33 -0700 Received: (qmail 77277 invoked by uid 60001); 8 Jul 2006 13:18:24 -0000 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=s1024; d=sbcglobal.net; h=Message-ID:Received:Date:From:Subject:To:In-Reply-To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding; b=CkoUss6sXIu8xvG94bla4Sj6rb3y3GGUc72xiVVJI2vXjpACDZ007VPvPI6QXMscphJDtGqzHqr4zfn5Go0DtXr/iyylxe+QTBR1jFwSrDwXHto4d83r9cP239kDLsQ3vHtyz8hrL9Vj/TLIjbIRwiPdXher+YwuHvPuW2Qa/a0= ; Message-ID: <20060708131824.77275.qmail@web81304.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Received: from [70.237.228.212] by web81304.mail.mud.yahoo.com via HTTP; Sat, 08 Jul 2006 06:18:24 PDT Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2006 06:18:24 -0700 (PDT) From: John E Clifford Subject: [lojban] Re: Latin alphabet everywhere? To: lojban-list@lojban.org In-Reply-To: <3c5.4b0b141.31e0f897@wmconnect.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Spam-Score: -0.7 (/) X-archive-position: 11979 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: clifford-j@sbcglobal.net Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list Well, a look at street signs -- for example -- in most such countries show that the Latin alphabet is used in some official places at least (also in advertising and certain business practices). To be sure, many people on the street don't have a operant knowledge of it. But then they don't have one of their native writing system either. China actively (but not too actively, admittedly) promotes Pinyin for early education (in the North at least, where it fits fairly well), India has always used the English alphabet -- with or without English -- for a range of government and commercial purposes, so every babu knows it, as do literate people of many other groups. The same applies pretty much across the board for the outer ring of Asian countries (in VietNam and Indonesia the Latin alphabet is established). I don't know about the situation in the inner countries (Mongolia used to have Cyrillic established: I don't know if it still does, and I suspect the form Soviet states still use it). The Arabic using world is somewhat different (different experience with missionaries and imperialism), but even there the Latin alphabet turns up fairly frequently -- wherever there is some influx of Western culture (so most in Lebanaon, Egypt and Algiers; less in Arabia and Mesopotamia. but growing in all areas. And turkey at one time banned arabic lettering in any but religious contexts (I think that has been lifted by some recent government. As for inadequacy, the problems with Chinese (the only case where inadequacy is really at issue (Latin may be dumb for, say, Japanese, but it works just fine)is not one of adequacy but of trying to find one writing system that works equally well for several (two major) mutually unintelligible langauges (objectively stated -- we call them dialects for historical reasons). For that matter, the traditional system doesn't work all that well -- the phonetic elements of characters are becoming more and more useless, even in the home dialect, so the system has become a purely memorized (rather than understood) one. I think your objection overstates the opposite case. The point is that potential Lojban users NOW will already know the Latin alphabet, not that every speaker of the some language -- or even every literate speaker -- will. --- MorphemeAddict@wmconnect.com wrote: > In a message dated 7/8/2006 4:21:58 AM Central Standard Time,John E Clifford < > clifford-j@sbcglobal.net> via ecartis@digitalkingdom.org writes: > > > > Well, the Latin alphabet is used for just about every language there > > currently is (with local > > > > I can't believe you said that. > Almost all of Asia and most of northern Africa uses a non-Latin (often > non-alphabet) form of writing. And while the Latin alphabet can be used to > transliterate the pronunciations of those other forms of writing, it is woefully > inadequate for Chinese-character-based systems, and the native speakers usually > still won't be able to read it. So as a generalization, I think you way > overstated the case. > > stevo > 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.