Return-Path: Message-Id: <9205061951.AA27063@relay1.UU.NET> Date: Wed May 6 16:12:39 1992 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: alternative orthography - response to Mark X-To: 70674.1215@compuserve.com, conlang@buphy.bu.edu, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann Status: RO X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Wed May 6 16:12:39 1992 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN John posted his proposal without the obvious explanation for it, which I will add. It hopefully takes care of all of Mark's criticisms. The alternate orthography is a mapping from Lojban back to the original orthography of Loglan, with a couple of things that JCB added after the split like the doubled letters for syllabic consonants. Thus, JCB used "ao" for the diphthong that we write in Lojban as "au". JCB doesn't use apostrophes in non-diphthong VV pairs. (he has never addressed the problem that we resolved through the devoiced glide). He uses 'h', but 'x' as a distinct phoneme is found only in names, whereas historically, Loglan considered our 'x' to be an allophone of 'h'. IN short, the proposal is a way to write Lojban so that it looks more like any other version of Loglan, and hence may be more palatable to JCB. I don;t think that any Lojbanist considers any of the alternatives MORE desirable than what we do now - we made the changes because we think that the actual Lojban orthography better reflects the way people will speak the language. But having an orthography that looks more 'normal' to JCB is an advantage in trying to reach a long term solution to our differences - something that I think we have always sought. By having a set of standard mappings between the two orthographies, it becomes relatively trivial for someone to write a program that can spit out text in one orthography in the other form. Thus TLI Loglanists have to do a minimum of relearning to be able to start participating in the Lojban community, should such be a workable part of the resolution of our differences. hope this explains things a little better. lojbab