From Pycyn@aol.com Mon Sep 20 08:54:06 1999
X-Digest-Num: 239
Message-ID: <44114.239.1314.959273825@eGroups.com>
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 11:54:06 EDT
From: Pycyn@aol.com
Subject: Lojban Orthography (has been several other things)
X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 1314

Enough of this airy-fairy orthographic fights, even if they are about the 
work of
reasonably proficient linguists.  Let's think about orthographies for real 
languages here. Most of the features that have been suggested exist in at 
least one set of real
orthographies, the Indic, e.g. Devanagari, for which typesetting facilities 
already exist
(though I don't know the name of any of the various versions).  Ligatures are 
available for almost any combo you like but are generally fairly transparent, 
vowels can be collapsed to diacritic dimensions within words or expanded to 
the same size as consonants, semivowels exist in both consonantal and 
vowel-like forms, . and ' have natural -- and appropriately sized -- 
expressions, diphthongs have special forms quite different from vowel 
sequences, etc. etc.  And very few forms are easily confused with one 
another, despite sharing a history with Hebrew, Armenian and Siamese 
orthographies, of which the muddle factors are often claimed.
    On broader issues, I again note that some parts of ProtoThinker(tm) might 
be used as a step toward a translation program into/out of Lojban.  AndI like 
the idea of a Lojban word processor with all the peripherals (word check, 
spelling completion, place structure, compound analyser and grammar check).
pc