[lojban] Re: Alphabet proposal one.

[Pierre Abbat <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On Friday 07 July 2006 12:30, komfo,amonan wrote:
> 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 the top six languages:
Chinese is written in ideograms, which are also used by Japanese with the 
addition of kana for anything not writable in kanji. Writing Lojban in kanji 
would not make sense.
English and Spanish use the Latin alphabet, which is also used for many other 
languages.
Hindi uses the Nagari abugida, which is used for writing several other 
languages in and near India. Adapting Nagari to Lojban is doable.
Russian is written in Cyrillic, which is also used for other Slavic languages 
and Soviet languages of a variety of families. Adapting Cyrillic to Lojban is 
simple and has been done.
Arabic is written in the Arabic abjad, which is also used for Persian, Urdu, 
and a few other languages. With only three vowels, which can be long or short 
and are often not written, it doesn't fit Lojban well. The Turks gave it up 
in favor of the Latin alphabet.

phma


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