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Message-ID: <20050104020025.23850.qmail@web51604.mail.yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 18:00:25 -0800 (PST)
In-Reply-To: <20050104013340.41740.qmail@web41904.mail.yahoo.com>
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From: jordi mas <lojban-out@lojban.org>
Reply-To: jordimastrullenque@yahoo.com
Subject: [lojban] Re: Lojban Lookup - program for Windows
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> > Now a quiz. There are seven vowel sounds in modern
> 
> > Hindi. One of them behaves very differently 
> > from the other seven, from the point of view 
> > of the phonology of Hindi. Suppose we want to
> write
> > Hindi with Roman letters. Should we use a letter 
> > to write that vowel? Or would some punctuation
> > sign make more sense? 
> 
> I don't know, do they use a special symbol
> themselves?
> How do the seven vowel sounds map to the five
> available 
> vowel letters? And what is the traditional way to
> write them with Roman letters? 

You see? There are many PRACTICAL factors to consider,
besides the idealistic factor of wanting a different
kind of symbol because the phoneme has a different
phonotactics! You didn't say this time 
"A different phonetic behaviour entails necessarily
the use of a different class of symbol, whether or not
this compensates the problems this may cause elsewhere
is another matter"!

What I like about lojban is that it is developed
in a mainly idealistic way. Practical considerations,
"real-world usability", are  often ignored. That's a 
good thing. Practical languages are boring, most often
the solutions that work are unimaginative.

(Incidentally: yes, they use a special symbol
themselves but this was not caused by the special
phonotactics, is mere chance, phonetic evolution just
happened that way; the vowels map just fine if you use
a special symbol for hiatus and awfully otherwise; and
there is no traditional way to
romanize, Hindi is traditionally written with the
devanagari alphabet. When forced to use the Roman
alphabet, as in computers, different Hindi speakers
improvise different romanization)

Anyway, I was kidding. No ill feelings!

Regards, 

--jordi


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