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[lojban] Re: [hobyrne: Alphabet]
Hugh O'Byrne wrote:
On 6/30/06, *Mark E. Shoulson* <mark@kli.org <mailto:mark@kli.org>>
wrote:
...
Dyslexia... a very good point which I hadn't even considered.
...
It's not *meant* to be easy, as much as it's meant to be *good*.
...
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.
Hm. I guess what you're saying is, I'm pushing Lojban beyond its
initial design parameters. I'm the guy who wants a 0.01-second
resolution digital race timer on his toaster, because a toaster needs to
measure time, right? But timing an athlete's laps around a track is not
what a toaster is for.
But I'll continue talking about timers on toasters, because even if I
don't get what I want, I still think I can help improve. If it's
incompatible with this generation's initial design parameters, I can
hope it will be integrated earlier into the next generation's design.
Perhaps that's the cause of some of the friction I'm feeling in this
forum. Hm. I'm not sure. I'll have to think on that.
Your analogy isn't bad. No matter how awesome the toaster, it simply
will never need a nanosecond-resolution clock. So long as it's a toaster.
What it really comes down to is what you say a little later on...
Confession of pettiness: I guess it's also partly vanity. Part of my
attraction to VS is that it's exotic. It's strange, and new, and
different, and the kind of thing that might be a plot element in a
conspiracy novel. (I feel compelled to say, THERE IS NO PRIORY OF SION,
Of course there isn't! Zion is built on hilltops, not on a prairie! :)
Hm. Jay F. Kominek made a very good point to me that the Lojban
alphabet is not *phonetic*, it is *phonemic*, and it is that way by
design, and for a very good reason.
This is really the point. VS is like IPA, meant to transcribe
*sounds*. It's phonetic. Most languages can be written in IPA, but
most would rather not be (and indeed are not). Even though we have this
powerful alphabet for writing sounds, still we invent other, simpler
writing systems for languages that have no writing system. Why?
Because IPA isn't suited for being a standard writing system. You could
use a few pieces of it and extremely broad transcription and make a
phonemic orthography out of it, but it's only barely IPA anymore, and
usually gets simplified to something with more common symbols. IPA is
useful for writing stuff down that really is tied to the phones, not the
phonemes. It is NOT a phonemic alphabet (esp. since phonemes are
language-dependent). For a writing system, Lojban, like most other
languages, doesn't need IPA. VS is designed to fill the exact same role
that IPA later came to fill. So Lojban doesn't need VS *as its writing
system* any more than it needs IPA.
Now... setting up a subset of VS to be used phonemically for writing
Lojban is another matter, and no sillier than many of the other
alternate orthographies we like to play with. And using VS instead of
IPA when a phonetic alphabet is called for, in Lojban context or not, is
also a worthy notion. I think that's what riled folks, the idea of
using a phonetic alphabet for Lojban instead of a phonemic one.
I would love if a lingust (phonetologist, if there is such a thing, or
word) would interview a ventriloquist, a voice actor, an impersonator, a
comedy vocalist; get their inputs on VS and Lhoerr and related
concepts, how sounds are made in the mouth, and worked with that for a
while. These people may have insights that would lead to a yet more
complete map of sound-space. When a guy makes a sound like dripping
water, what manner of IPA symbol would that be? :)
A phonetician. I think there are still some. Some of the IPA symbols
for "disordered speech" have some of those weird sounds. VS can manage
some of them too.
The guys working with these things *also* think alot about sounds and
how they're made, and they're smarter than you might think.
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.
Yeah. But I like it! I think it's good and useful. I'd like to raise
its profile. I reluctantly begin to see that jamming it into Lojban's
framework at this late stage is not going to happen. But, as I said,
maybe an equivalent goal will be served by the future inventors of
Lojban 2.0 reading this list.
It's the wrong tool for the job, even for Lojban 2.0, as we saw above.
However, it might be the right tool for a *different* job as part of
Lojban. Lojban currently does not specify a phonetic notation. Maybe
someday that might be considered within the purview of the language, and
VS/Lhoerr would be the tool for that.
Lojban is *cool*. That makes it good, and fun. VS and Lhoerr are
cool. (Maybe not as exciting, though.) The two both embody insightful,
structural representation of communication, at different levels. The
two together would be cool on top of cool. And who doesn't want cool on
top of cool?!! :)
Actually, you'd be surprised. A lot of people, even among us weirdos
who populate Lojban lists, have all kinds of motivations. Some people
are more motivated by practical ends, and see "cool" as just a
distraction making it even harder to push Lojban's acceptance. And a
lot of us *like* cool. And there's always some conflict of desires
between the groups.
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