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Re: [lojban] Re: [hobyrne: Alphabet]

Mark E. Shoulson wrote:

Hugh O'Byrne wrote:


I am an idealist.  It is my weakness.
Probably all of us are idealists to one extent or another, or we wouldn't be interested in Lojban in the first place. 

I thought so. :)


Lojbanistan appears to be a land where I cannot
physically hurt someone...
I'm not sure what you mean by not being able to hurt someone, unless you mean the geographical dispersion of the Lojban community. With the rise of the internet, that is not a unique feature. 

No no no, I was just talking about talking.  As I said, ideals can be
dangerous.  Overvaluing ideals is what makes extremists (as I wrote,
genocides have been 'justified' by ideals).  I myself am dismayed and a
little frightened by people who push their 'ideals' too zealously.
Since that's exactly what *I* was doing, I wanted to soften the message.
 In a region of mind-space, a *metaphorical* 'land', which is what I
took Lojbanistan to be, I feel I can be an strong idealist without being
some kind of dangerous extremist, or being seen as violent or frightening.

All I have are my words, and Lojbanistan doesn't even have a big red
button on a nuclear missile, even if I wanted to do something stupid and
destructive.  (Maybe I'm still a little oversensitive about 9/11-type
extremists.  Those people were motivated by ideals too.  It's important
to remember that.  I don't want to be like them.)
On 6/30/06, *Mark E. Shoulson* <mark@kli.org <mailto:mark@kli.org>> wrote: 


...


Dyslexia... a very good point which I hadn't even considered.

...
It's not *meant* to be easy, as much as it's meant to be *good*.
...
I'm not wild about the answer either. I can see the point, in that it makes Lojban a consciousness-raising exercise in phonology as well as in logic and linguistics, but that wasn't a goal I had envisioned for Lojban. Speaking and reading Lojban forces one to refine and confront logical and philosophical ideas; it's fascinating to try to re-cast everyday sentences into Lojban even if you don't bother with the vocabulary. Just to see the structures that were hiding underneath the surface of the natural language. 

Hm.  I guess what you're saying is, I'm pushing Lojban beyond its
initial design parameters.  I'm the guy who wants a 0.01-second
resolution digital race timer on his toaster, because a toaster needs to
measure time, right?  But timing an athlete's laps around a track is not
what a toaster is for.

But I'll continue talking about timers on toasters, because even if I
don't get what I want, I still think I can help improve.  If it's
incompatible with this generation's initial design parameters, I can
hope it will be integrated earlier into the next generation's design.

Perhaps that's the cause of some of the friction I'm feeling in this
forum.  Hm.  I'm not sure.  I'll have to think on that.
Using VS for Lojban would in some way bring the same thing to phonology, but since Lojban only has a few dozen sounds (and very narrow transcription would be a Bad Idea), there aren't many lessons to be learned. Once you got the hang of the 20-30 parts of VS used to write Lojban, there isn't much more insight you're going to get from the writing system. 

Insight into physical aspects of speech was one of the issues I was
pushing, yes.  And even if it doesn't provide a *continuous* learning
experience, that doesn't invalidate that there *is* value in learning.
There's more to the sound-symbol isomorphism, the levels of
representation within the symbols, though.  An audible mistake becomes
isomorphic to a visual distortion.  Transcription mistakes of the
oops-I-misheard-you type and mistakes of the oops-I-slipped-my-pen type
actually map in (somewhat) the same way.  And both can be fully examined
in the visual world, like I explained, as easily by deaf people as by
hearing.  It would help with elocution lessons to people with impaired
speech.  ...  I'm sure there's even more to be said about it.  My
imagination isn't stretching far enough.  Maybe it'll make it easier to
change a voice synthesizer to have a Texas accent, I don't know.  My gut
feeling is that advantges will be found in several more respects, maybe
in many ways, after it has been incorporated into a framework such as
Lojban.  As it grows into the language, like ivy on latticework, I
imagine both together interacting in ways I can't even think of yet.

Confession of pettiness:  I guess it's also partly vanity.  Part of my
attraction to VS is that it's exotic.  It's strange, and new, and
different, and the kind of thing that might be a plot element in a
conspiracy novel.  (I feel compelled to say, THERE IS NO PRIORY OF SION,
people!  Also, TINC.)
VS is a very clever and useful system for phonetic transcription, and one which I think deserves far wider use, but as an everyday writing system, particularly for a language with such simple phonetics as Lojban, it's overkill. 

Hm.  Jay F. Kominek made a very good point to me that the Lojban
alphabet is not *phonetic*, it is *phonemic*, and it is that way by
design, and for a very good reason.  A phonemic symbol can represent
more than one sound, e.g. a regular English flat 'r' and a French rolled
'r' are different phonetic entities (because they do sound qualitatively
different), but the same phonemic entity in many languages, including
Lojban (because it is acceptable to read the letter 'r' either way,
transcribing either sound will be the same letter 'r', and if you change
from one to the other, you don't get a different word).  A design goal
of Lojban was to allow room for local accents, to make it easier for
people to be understood in the language without having to stray too far
from sounds they're already comfortable making.  As such, Lojban *needs*
a phonemic alphabet, and a phonetic one is *bad*, too restrictive.  (Too
precise, which leads to another complaint of VS, that the symbol set is
too big.)

So, my new goal is to push a representative phonemic alphabet *based* on
a representative phonetic one, not a phonetic one directly.
... I saw this in a fascinating video in which parents were given an opportunity to see what it's like in school for a student who is learning disabled and/or dyslexic. ... 

I agree that the features on the symbols of VS are subtle, making it
more difficult to read (doubly so for dyslexics).  Lhoerr goes a little
way to mitigating that, but probably only a very little way.  I still
see this as the biggest point against the idea.
Lhoerr is a much more recent invention, and so benefits from a more modern (and presumably more thorough and more accurate) understanding of phonology. 

Mmm.  I imagine, even 150 years ago, that it was obvious to anyone who
thought along those lines that 'p' 'b' 'm' 't' 'd' 'n' 'k' 'g' 'ng' make
a regular 3*3 grid in sound-space.  I guess linguists these days travel
more, have much easier access to many more types of languages, which
should make the sound map more complete.

I would love if a lingust (phonetologist, if there is such a thing, or
word) would interview a ventriloquist, a voice actor, an impersonator, a
comedy vocalist; get their inputs on VS and Lhoerr and related concepts, how sounds are made in the mouth, and worked with that for a while. These people may have insights that would lead to a yet more complete map of sound-space. When a guy makes a sound like dripping water, what manner of IPA symbol would that be? :)
It isn't as well-known as Visible Speech, however, which admittedly sounds like a bad joke: hardly anyone knows about VS either. But even "more hardly" anyone knows about Lhoerr. 

Yeah.  But I like it!  I think it's good and useful.  I'd like to raise
its profile.  I reluctantly begin to see that jamming it into Lojban's
framework at this late stage is not going to happen.  But, as I said,
maybe an equivalent goal will be served by the future inventors of
Lojban 2.0 reading this list.


    The other thing, though, is that Lojban in particular doesn't *need*
    VS.


The issue of *need* is addressed in another post.
I think much of it is a disconnect between respective ideas of what Lojban "needs." Which I guess is also obvious. I would agree that the logical structure of VS makes it excellent and fitting to be used as a Lojbanic equivalent of IPA, i.e. in Lojban linguistic texts and such things, it would be a great phonetic alphabet (since after all, that's what it is!), but it doesn't seem appropriate as Lojban's *everyday* writing system. (or rather one of them; after all, Lojban can be written in many alphabets.) 

I agree that it's not a *necessity*.
Lojban is *cool*. That makes it good, and fun. VS and Lhoerr are cool. (Maybe not as exciting, though.) The two both embody insightful, 
structural representation of communication, at different levels.  The
two together would be cool on top of cool.  And who doesn't want cool on
top of cool?!! :)
Of course, the neat thing would be if sounds that sounded similar were not only written similar, but also *meant* similar things. i.e. if words somehow could have similar semantic and phonetic distances between them. There are languages that have attempted to work this way (Ro and Solresol spring to mind), with varying degrees of success (actually, mostly poor success); Lojban isn't one of them. Which is neither here nor there. 

That is indeed an intriguing way of extending the isomorphism yet
further.  I must investigate Ro and Solresol.  I'm learning so much!! :)
Ah, using VS as an "official" culturally-neutral Lojbanic spelling for things inside ZOI (and la'o) quotes; THAT is truly excellent. It melds the logical sensibility of Lojban and VS with the purpose of VS as a phonetic alphabet. 

Yaay!  I scored a point!  *victory dance, followed by victory pose*
(fortunately for those who think visually, I actually *am* wearing pants
this time) :)

Another thing I do is generalize, a *lot*.  I see a paraphrasing of the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis(/axiom), something like 'ideas that cannot be
easily expressed in a language, are less easy to manage for someone
thinking in that language', and right after the 'duh' reaction, I
(almost unconsciously) extend the idea to include stuff like 'sounds
that are not expressed in a language known to a person (e.g. rolling
French 'r's to someone who only knows English) are less easy for that
person to say'.  Duh.  I generalize to the point where I find the value
of thinking about either (or both) insights, invididually, far less than
the value of thinking about the more fundamental underlying insight,
something along the lines of "When there is a commonly understood
representation of a thing, that thing is easier to work with", of which
these two are merely obvious corollaries.

In fact, that's exactly the parallel of the extension to the Lojban
philosophy I see in VS.  I don't see the conceptual-space that
Sapir-Whorf and Lojban inhabit as *necessarily* being that far from the
physical sound-space of phonetics and phonemics.  I like to make
connections where I can, and these ideas are in my head, just *begging*
to get connected.

mi'e .xius.