RE: Lojban Orthography (has been several other things)

[trevor hill <thill@quark.com>]

	So...  IMHO, typography will grow naturally out of the orthography
one creates...  so we really don't have to worry about that.  What we have
to worry about is mapping our set of phonemes to a set of simple glyphs,
that work together to make learning and reading easy and logical...  

	This, as you all know, is not as easy as it sounds, because the set
of simple glyphs that can be written easily, and look cool/nice is small...
Also, choosing individual glyphs for phonemes doesn't guarantee that they
will look good together when composed with a 'logical' method... Therefore,
IMHO one has to create the orthography first from the perspective of the
visual representation: What do you want the text to look like in this
orthography?  Then slowly work from that end towards your logical concept of
phonemes and morphemes and all that, and mesh them together somehow...

	The main point is, if you just work from the language to the script,
rather than the other way around, you end up with a really nasty script.  I
invented a script recently, and it really kicks ass....  written vertically,
top to bottom, left to right, it comes out looking like each word is a big
hiragana character.....  anyway, it achieves graphical 'logic' and beauty
because that was the first consideration..... :)

	With regard to current world scripts, i really think hangul is the
most 'logical' of scripts in existance today, from our perspective...  I've
wrestled repeatedly over the years to find ways to express more sounds in
hangul, so as to adapt it to lojban, for instance, but have always been
unsatisfied with the result.....  :(  I think we really should have people
individually invent scripts of their own for lojban, and choose the best
one...  that would preserve the creative integrity of the script, and maybe
we could come up with a really cool one.... ;)

	ki'e co'o

	trevor hill
	thill@quark.com