[lojban-beginners] Lojban neography

[Matt Arnold <mattarn@123.net>]

coi rodo,
    A couple of years ago I read of Eric S. Raymond's Tengwar orthography for Lojban (http://www.catb.org/~esr/tengwar/lojban-tengwar.html) and it got me thinking about Lojban alphabets. I had an idea which I've been working on for a couple of years, to design an alphabet along certain principles:
1. Each word would be written without the pen leaving the page; no dotting i's or crossing t's. A gap in the line would represent the period character, which is a pause.
2. Unlike cursive, the baseline would be in the vertical center instead of at the bottom, so that voiced consonants and vowels would tend to be descenders, and unvoiced consonants would tend to be ascenders.
3. Voiced and unvoiced equivalent sounds would be upside-down versions of the same character.
4. Labial plosives resemble a lip, dental plosives resemble a tooth, m and n resemble a pair of nostrils, and so on. The resemblance is vague and evocative rather than literal of course, given the quick simplicity necessary for an alphabet.
    I gave serious thought to the issue of making characters to represent very common words, the way that we have ampersand, number sign, and the "at" sign in English. Specifically I would like there to be characters for {le}, {lo}, {la}, {mi}, {do}, {cu}, {nu}. and {gi'e}. These can be added at a later date.
    Of course it's not necessary to make the alphabet official in the canon, but it seems fun to me to have it available. It would be nice to have a page on the wiki for those who would enjoy tinkering with such a project. Here is a link to the alphabet: http://www.geocities.com/nemorathwald/lojban_alphabet.jpg
    Please try writing sentences in it and help me find places where two characters (that can follow each other legally in Lojban) would appear misleading together. When it has survived such a trial I will submit it to the neography section of www.Langmaker.com.
-epkat


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