[lojban-beginners] Re: Orthography

["Vid Sintef" <picos.picos@gmail.com>]

> I believe it would be possible to develop a method for writing Lojban using
> Chinese characters, but it would require a lot of work from someone with a
> very thorough knowledge. I figure you would need to assign at least one
> character for each word and one for each rafsi.
>
> mu'o mi'e .sen.

Example:

jbena / 生
djedi / 日
jbena djedi / 生日 (birthday)

bacru / 言
sance / 音
bacru sance / 言音
ba'usna / 諳 (pronunciation)

spati / 木
slabu / 古
spati slabu / 木古 (plant-kind-of getting-old / wither)
spasau 枯

枯, like 諳, is a single character, with 木 and 古 as its components,
which parallels the actual lujvo composition. In this case, the two
rafsi are respectively represented by the compressed shape (or the
"radical") of each character assigned to the originating gismu. The
form itself will not indicate which rafsi is used when there are more
than one (ex. "dje" or "dei" of "djedi"), just like nothing indicates
on the fly what combination of place structures is intended. But it
can be defined on the vlaste, just like the place structure can only
be determined in there. This would involve a departure from the
audio-visual isomorphism, yet I opine this can give rise to more
intelligibility of lujvo since their components (rafsi) immediately
tells which gismu the word comes from (so that one will be able to
understand, if not pronounce, all Lojban texts once he/she has
memorized all gismu and cmavo but rafsi).

The radical's position, in addition to its shape, may help distinguish
the type of rafsi. 普, 明, and 旭 all share the same radical 日, and this
variety of position can possibly correspond to the variety of type of
rafsi (CVC, CCV, CVV) assigned to each gismu. Examples (their meanings
may be nonsense, but just to illustrate how the morphology would
work):

djedi / 日
pordje / 普 (porsi djedi / 並日)
sozdei / 旭 (so djedi / 九日)

When it's at the bottom, 日 becomes "dje"; when it's on the right side,
it's "dei"; when it's alone, it's the gismu or the 5-letter rafsi
"djedi".

Another trick will be necessary for making fu'ivla. Like
"djedngaifoks" (an annual British celebration). The problem is how to
represent the 4-letter rafsi & the hyphen & the following Lojbanized
names. A possiblity might be to use Japanese Katakana, which has
natively coexisted with Chinese characters: djedngaifoks -> 日ンガイフォクス.
Unfortunately, Katakana (and Hiragana) is syllabary and cannot
represent any single consonant separately except "n" ("ス" is "su", and
there is no real equivalent for "s"), so that most Katakana renditions
of fu'ivla are bound to be invalid according to the grammar. Korean
Hangul, which is a phonemic alphabet and has a history of coexistence
with Chinese characters, would be a better option.

mi'e vid