On 7/7/06, *John E Clifford* <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net
<mailto:clifford-j@sbcglobal.net>> wrote:
--- Betsemes <betsemes@gmail.com <mailto: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.