Re: [lojban] Re: Lojban alphabets

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

Some thoughts on a featural alphabet for Lojban:

1- In principle, I like it as an idea. In practice, I don't see the community
of Lojbanists adopting one in the short term, simply because it would
be too impractical to do so. This could actually be a good thing, as it
allows the designers of such an alphabet plenty of time to tinker with
it without worrying that people will be learning a version that would then
become obsolete.

2- In terms of efficiency of number of symbols to be learned, I don't think
a lot is gained by going down to features.
2a- For vowels, there is no gain at all, as there are six vowels
and six features: a, e, i, o, u, y and open/mid/close, front/central/back).
One feature combination is unused (mid back) and three combinations
constitute the same phoneme: /a/ is just open, whether front, central or
back.
2b- For consonants, there are 19 consonants and 12 features (five
points of articulation, five manners of articulation, and voiced/unvoiced),
so while there is a slight gain in efficiency, it is not extremely
significant.

3- One possible advantage of a featural alphabet that I don't think has
been mentioned is that it might help with the learning of phonotactics.
Some people have trouble recognizing which consonants are voiced and
which are unvoiced for example, so if this was encoded in the character
that represents the phoneme they would have an easier time knowing
when they are required to insert a {y} in making a lujvo. There are a few
other phonotactic rules that are based on features too. By the same token
though, a featural alphabet would also have the disadvantage of exposing
some other phonotactic rules as totally arbitrary :)

mu'o mi'e xorxes