Language creation

["Mr Ekted" <mr_ekted@hotmail.com>]

As I get more into learning lojban, I see some of the reasons behind the choices made. But so far, I am confused about the choices made in the design of the following aspects:

Remove puncuation. A good idea since we do not pronounce it when we read it. But then the choice was made to litter the language with . and ' which is really starting to get annoying. I understand that they are technically part of the alphabet, but to me they read as noise. They make smooth reading more difficult. We remove "." from the end of sentences, but then we add back ".i". Many of the most common/useful modifiers contain "non-diphthonged" vowels requiring the use of "'". If "'" sounds like "h", then use "h". :)

Vowels. Choices were made to keep things from sounding the same, but then why have a short "e" and the schwa "y"? Why have "ur" when it's almost impossible to distinguish from "or"? Every time I have to pronounce words like "se'u" in my head it's like hitting a brick wall.

One last thing. I've jumped ahead a bit in the lessons. It seems that lojban actually consists of a relatively small core of base words, and that the rest are "manufactured" by forming compounds (kind of like German). Is this really true? Like maybe there's no word for computer, just some compound word like box-with-buttons-and-lights.