[lojban] Re: Alphabet proposal one.

[John E Clifford <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

The point being that many people who speak -- and write -- those other languages also know the
Latin alphabet -- for English (etc.) perhaps, but also for their own languages, whether officially
or not (even fifty years ago, most advertising signs in India were in Latin characters as well as
Devanagiri and it has only gotten more so since, and we won't bother noting Pinyin).

--- "komfo,amonan" <komfoamonan@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 7/7/06, John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> >
> > --- Betsemes <betsemes@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > This leads me to a question. How is the latin alphabet culturally
> > > biased? Is it just because it comes from languages that comes from
> > > Latin or is it because some other reason?
> >
> > Well, the Latin alphabet is used for just about every language there
> > currently is (with local
> > modifications, mainly as to pronunciation) but it the alphabet of the
> > civilization/culture of
> > Western Europe and that (derivatively from the dominance of that culture)
> > is why it is so widely
> > used.  So, I suppose that rejecting it as culturally biased is a step in
> > antiimperialism,
> 
> 
> Well, more people use the Latin alphabet than any other, I suspect. But
> given Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and the South Asian languages, there's a
> *lot* of folks who *don't* use it. I counted 2 billion in the language
> ranking list only going down to Punjabi (no. 13). As far as the number of
> *languages* go, yeah, most of our 6000 languages have, like, 4,000 speakers
> & are written in the Latin alphabet by western scholars.
> 
> Of course it's culturally biased. It favors the people who already know it.
> People who grew up writing in  Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Korean, Armenian,
> &c. systems have to learn it outright before they can get started on
> Lojban.  But whether Lojban's ideal of cultural neutrality was ever intended
> to extend that far is another issue.
> 
> mu'o mi'e komfo,amonan
> 



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