[lojban] Re: Latin alphabet everywhere?

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

Well, a look at street signs -- for example -- in most such countries show that the Latin alphabet
is used in some official places at least (also in advertising and certain business practices).  To
be sure, many people on the street don't have a operant knowledge of it.  But then they don't have
one of their native writing system either.  China actively (but not too actively, admittedly)
promotes Pinyin for early education (in the North at least, where it fits fairly well), India has
always used the English alphabet -- with or without English -- for a range of government and
commercial purposes, so every babu knows it, as do literate people of many other groups. The same
applies pretty much across the board for the outer ring of Asian countries (in VietNam and
Indonesia the Latin alphabet is established).  I don't know about the situation in the inner
countries (Mongolia used to have Cyrillic established: I don't know if it still does, and I
suspect the form Soviet states still use it).  The Arabic using world is somewhat different
(different experience with missionaries and imperialism), but even there the Latin alphabet turns
up fairly frequently -- wherever there is some influx of Western culture (so most in Lebanaon,
Egypt and Algiers; less in Arabia and Mesopotamia.  but growing in all areas.  And turkey at one
time banned arabic lettering in any but religious contexts (I think that has been lifted by some
recent government.
As for inadequacy, the problems with Chinese (the only case where inadequacy is really at issue
(Latin may be dumb for, say, Japanese, but it works just fine)is not one of adequacy but of trying
to find one writing system that works equally well for several (two major) mutually unintelligible
langauges (objectively stated -- we call them dialects for historical reasons).  For that matter,
the traditional system doesn't work all that well -- the phonetic elements of characters are
becoming more and more useless, even in the home dialect, so the system has become a  purely
memorized (rather than understood) one.
I think your objection overstates the opposite case.  The point is that potential Lojban users NOW
will already know the Latin alphabet, not that every speaker of the some language -- or even every
literate speaker -- will. 

--- MorphemeAddict@wmconnect.com wrote:

> In a message dated 7/8/2006 4:21:58 AM Central Standard Time,John E Clifford <
> clifford-j@sbcglobal.net> via ecartis@digitalkingdom.org writes:
> 
> 
> > Well, the Latin alphabet is used for just about every language there 
> > currently is (with local
> > 
> 
> I can't believe you said that.
> Almost all of Asia and most of northern Africa uses a non-Latin (often 
> non-alphabet) form of writing.  And while the Latin alphabet can be used to 
> transliterate the pronunciations of those other forms of writing, it is woefully 
> inadequate for Chinese-character-based systems, and the native speakers usually 
> still won't be able to read it.  So as a generalization, I think you way 
> overstated the case.
> 
> stevo
> 



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