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[lojban-beginners] Re: consonant doubling?

On 6/18/07, Vid Sintef <picos.picos@gmail.com> wrote:


I meant Esperanto's stronger adhesion to the Romance languages in various
aspects. People whose native tongue is one of the Romances would find
Esperanto easy to learn more than Thai or Arabic speakers would.


That's certainly true.


And I think
that is an indication of the alienative nature of Esperanto, while being
called an international auxiliary language; its internationality and
auxiliariness, on the linguistic level, are actually limited.


That's debatable, but not because its phonology is more complicated
than Lojban's, as they are quite similar.


Particularly the orthography of Esperanto can be more outlandish than that
of Lojban.


Depends what you mean by outlandish. It is actually very similar to
Lojban's: a, b, d, e, f, g, i, k, l, m, n ,o, p, r, s, t, u, v and z
are identical.

Esperanto c is Lojban's ts
Esperanto cx is Lojban's tc
Esperanto gx is Lojban's dj
Esperanto h is Lojban's apostrophe
Esperanto hx is Lojban's x
Esperanto j is Lojban's i in diphthongs
Esperanto jx is Lojban's j
Esperanto sx is Lojban's c
Esperanto ux is Lojban's u in diphthongs

(The x represents a circumflex on the consonants, or a breve on u.)
Not really very outlandish.


And while presumably few people would have difficulty in typing
in Lojban, many would find it awkward to do the same task in Esperanto for
the first time (the character set of Esperanto is far less universal than
that of Lojban).


Yes, typing some of the characters can be complicated (that's why the x
convention is used), but that doesn't really have anything to do with the
phonology.


If the phonologies of Esperanto and Lojban look alike, that's not
necessarily because the designers of one side wanted to copy the other's,
but rather because when you simplify a phonology it does gain more
generality; the more things get simplified for the same purpose, the more
they become alike.


The phonology that they share is not really that simple. There are too
many fricatives, for example. Not to mention consonant clusters, which
both have in abundance.


I'm not completely familiar with Esperanto either, but I'm convinced that
Lojban is linguistically more open than Esperanto can ever be.


Phonologically, they are very similar. In other aspects, such as grammar
and vocabulary, they are quite different. "Linguistically open", I don't know.

mu'o mi'e xorxes