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Re: [lojban] Re: fu'ivla
Stop me if I am wrong, but I think I detect under
your practical problem of writing something
written in a slavic alphabet in the "lojban"
alphabet a deepeer "philosophic" problem, which I
would put loosely as "A language to be used for
international communication ought to have an
alphabet in which expressions from any (major?)
language could be written easiily." If that is
indeed one of your points (along with the point
that the old Slavic alphabet seems to satisfy
that need and the Lojban alphabet does not), I
see several problems.
1. The alphabret for a given language -- even an
international one -- is the alphabet for *that*
language. It needs to be able to represent all
the sounds of that language, but it would be
wasteful for it to have separate symbols for
sounds that never occur in that language
directly, but only in quotations and the like
from some other languages. In the case of
Lojban, the alphabet exactly fits the language --
by design; other languages are either barely
approximated (and Lojban does as well by Slavic
languages as it does by English in this repect)
or else it imports (courtesy of the vast storage
capacity of computers to which Lojban is
intimately attached) the alphabet of the quoted
language (spoken Lojban, of course, is stuck
either with the approximations or with a case of
code-shifting to produce reasonably accurate
speech in the other language).
2. There is not alphabet -- other than the IPA
-- that does this job across the board. The
Lojban version of the Latin alphabet does fairly
well on Slavic, I recall, but not so well on
English, and pretty terribly on Chinese and
Hindi. The Slavic alphabet does pretty well with
Lojban but has much the same problems as Lojban
with English, Chinese and Hindi. The Chinese
version of the Latin alphabet does pretty poorly
across the board, thanks to the very small
phonetic range of Chinese. Devanagari (Hindi) is
not so hot for any of the others. The English
version of the Latin alphabet manages to do
fairly well for many other languages by having
incorporated a variety of codings -- digraphs and
even trigraphs -- with conventions for using them
in various other languages (they overlap some
from langauge to language, so that, if you know
how to work with them, you need to know what
language it is before you can figure out what it
sounds like). But none of them has a symbol for
every sound in every (even major) language (and
some are short even on conventional devices for
representing other languages).
3. Aside from names, an international language
(and, note, being an international language is
not a central goal of Lojban design, though it is
a pleasant side benefit) wants precisely to steer
clear of local expressions and replace them with
expressions understood across a variety of native
languages and cultures; local words are emergency
devices when all else fails (or are in for
"color"). So an international language will
actively avoid things (like easing pronunciation
rules or having extra alphabets) which promote
local language use in the context of the
international language.
In short, while the point I take you to be making
is an interesting one -- raising perhaps a
different notion of an international language --
it does not seem to be a practical goal and so
failing to meet it is not to be counted against
Lojban or any other language.
--- ignat 99 <ignat99@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> coi rodo
>
> Etruscans <-> eto_rus_(lo rusko ku) <-> rysich
> (name of old rus)
>
> ch <-> (ch .tcriyviys. bu tcys. bu)
> This letter and sound is absent in Lojban
>
> Take the good alphabet:
>
http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/DBLM/olcourse/sanskrit/s-alpha-1.htm
> or
>
http://www.lojban.org/en/publications/reference_grammar/chapter17.html#s17
> + old letterals
>
> :-))
>
> ki'e
> ignat
>
> On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 10:08:10 -0500, Adam COOPER
> <lojban-out@lojban.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 12:01:46 +0900, ignat 99
> <ignat99@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > coi rodo
> > > But Old Russian alphabet has 44 letters and
> new has 33.
> > > But in the American alphabet only 24
> letters. It is still less in
> > > lojban. It means one Russian letter
> necessary to transfer by several
> > > American. But more rational it would be
> make vice versa. As the base
> > > to take the Russian alphabet, but not
> American alphabet.
> > >
> > > But now, for the transfer of one letter in
> lojban, I must use 4-5 letters?
> >
> > AFAIK The focus of the Loglan/Lojban project
> was primarily meaning:
> > one ought to be able to express any concept
> in Lojban. Phonologically,
> > it makes sense to *minimize* the number of
> phonemes in the language,
> > in order to maximize pronounceability of the
> language for all people.
> >
> > If you want to translate an Old Russian text
> for international
> > understanding, Lojban is a good choice. If
> you want to *transliterate*
> > an Old Russian text for international
> pronunciation, a good bet is
> > IPA.
> >
> > By the way, Evgeny is right. It's not the
> American alphabet. The
> > Americans got it from the British, who got it
> from the Romans, who got
> > it from the Etruscans, who got it (I think)
> from the Phoenicians in
> > about 600 BC or so. Sorry -- BCE.
> >
> > mu'o mi'e .adam.
> >
> >
> >
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