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[lojban] Re: [hobyrne: Alphabet]

Hugh O'Byrne wrote:


Yay!  I'm on the list now.  I can defend my message!

Before I start, in the interests of disclosure, and providing a context
for my comments:

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. 


Lojbanistan appears to be a land where I cannot
physically hurt someone, even unintentionally, and is still academic and
theoretical enough that I feel I can safely unleash my idealism to the
furthest corners.
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.
On 6/30/06, *Mark E. Shoulson* <mark@kli.org <mailto:mark@kli.org>> wrote: 


    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.



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

I'm glad you brought it to my attention.  I shall have to sleep on this.
 I may write more on this point later.  The glib answer would be that
Lojban is more difficult for people who have trouble making formal
logical associations, and that's part of the intentional design of the
language.  It is *good* that the grammar is logical, even at the cost of
making it difficult.  To make it more difficult for people who have
trouble with spatial aspects of symbols, with the benefit of making the
alphabet more logical, seems in keeping with that Lojban philosophy.
It's not *meant* to be easy, as much as it's meant to be *good*. It's meant to be clean, and logical. I'm not too comfortable with this answer, though, because it makes Lojban (or at least my vision of it) appear terribly elitist.
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.
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.
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.
(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'm not sure what you're trying to express here.  Take a text and have
the computer replace every [aeio] with a random character from [aeio],
then try to read it.  Pick *any* four (relatively common) letters.  Pick
7.8% (approx. frequency of [dbpq] combined) of the letters in the text
randomly, and shuffle them.  A demonstration only statistically
demonstrates something when there are control cases too.
Yeah, not very well-stated on my part. 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. They did various tricks to show how things are hard to follow for such students. One thing they did was print a reading exercise with the baseline sort of wandering (i.e. some of the letters were superscript and some were subscript and some normal), and also with [bdpq] scrambled up. The point being that to someone whose spatial acuity doesn't distinguish orientation well, someone for whom those four letters are easily confused, it's awfully tough to read out loud, with everyone waiting for you. The point in the experiment is not to show that if you mix up letters it's hard to read (which I suppose is obvious), but to show just how hard it is, given that these letters are easily confused--as are most of the letters all through VS. 


 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.



Lhoerr does seem to be closer to Visible Speech than Hangul.  And it
uses a wider set of features on the symbols, which goes some way toward
addressing the "all letters look alike" argument.  Thanks!  You've
helped me (at least, partially) deflect the biggest argument against the
idea!  I like the look of it, I like it quite a bit; I'll investigate
some more.
Lhoerr is a much more recent invention, and so benefits from a more modern (and presumably more thorough and more accurate) understanding of phonology. 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. 


    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.) 


komfo_amonon speaks now:
But it seems that we don't think in terms of phonemes when we read. I don't reckon that the idea that /n/ is a nasal /d/ helps a reader very much and in fact it may hinder understanding. In situations where the minimal pairs lack a connection in their meanings ( e.g. {na}/{da}, {po}/{bo}), there's not much advantage to expressing the phonemic connection in the writing system. 


Maybe you don't think in terms of phonemes when you read the Latin
alphabet.  You don't think as much in terms of predicates when you read
English, do you? Isn't one of the important goals of Lojban to open the mind to new ways of thinking? Logical, structured representations?
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. 


Alphabets such as VS and Lhoerr teach a different way (a more
structured, logical way) to think about how we speak, and represent
speech.  How can anyone think they're *not* appropriate for Lojban?!
It's at a lower level, closer to the physical interface than the
information-bearing higher-level protocols, but it's *entirely* the
spirit of Lojban.

Also, Lojban has a mechanism for expressing words in foreign languages.
 But because of the limited number of phonemes, and the fact that the
phonemes of Lojban do not match phonemes of other languages exactly,
they can't be properly expressed in the Lojban alphabet.  VS/Lhoerr
needn't be used in its entirety to write basic Lojban, just pick the
symbols of the existing phonemes.  But it has the *capability* of
expressing foreign words with foreign sounds without going outside of
the system.
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. 

~mark


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