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[lojban] Re: [hobyrne: Alphabet]

Now, to respond to the Lojban-specific points from Hugh O'Byrne...


    From: Hugh O'Byrne
    To: lojban@lojban.org
    Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 11:30:31 -0400

    To whom it may concern,

    I adore Lojban. The biggest weakness it has, IMHO, is its alphabet.

    Recently, I came across "Visible Speech". The symbols of this alphabet
    indicate the sound they represent by their shape. For example, 'b',
    'd', and 'g' (as in bay, day, gay) are represented by the same
    symbol in
    three different orientations, because the sounds are so similar.
    'm' is
    a nasal 'b' sound, so its symbol is similar to 'b', with a small
    modification. 'n' is a nasal 'd', so it's the 'd' symbol with the same
    modification. 'ng' is a nasal 'g', so it's the 'g' symbol with the
    same
    modification.
You should know that VS is not unique in this, though it may be one of the more developed and consistent such systems. I *think* there is some basis to the claim that hangul is a featural script like this, and certainly Tolkien's tengwar is. And tengwar suffers from the same problem that VS does: all the letters are related and formed in neat logical ways... which means that they all look alike!! Reading tengwar takes a lot of practice, because all the letters look more or less alike. Think how much trouble dyslexics (and even non-dyslexics) have with d,b,p,q. Now imagine that the *entire alphabet* was like that. (Want to mess yourself up? Take a text and have the computer replace every [dbpq] with a *random* character from [dbpq]. Then try to read it). I recall also Herman Miller has a phonetic alphabet called Lhoerr or something like that which is similarly featural, rather like VS in philosophy though not in actual design.
The other thing, though, is that Lojban in particular doesn't *need* VS. It is the non-solution to a non-problem in Lojban. In *English* it would fill a need: English's writing system is a mess, and it's insanely complex to deduce how to pronounce an unfamiliar word in general. It also would be useful for the same purposes that we use the International Phonetic Alphabet. But Lojban's writing is phonemic already. The symbols are more or less arbitrary (though strangely familiar to huge chunks of the literate world), but in order to learn to read with any fluency you have to learn the symbols iconically, not as collections of features, so you'd have to learn the VS symbols as if they were arbitrary too. And once you have your 25-odd symbols learned, there's no advantage to using VS.
It's a nifty alphabet, but it doesn't seem to me to add anything to Lojban. Lojban may add something to IT, though, since it can discuss features unambiguously... 

~mark




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