[lojban] Re: Cultural Neutrality

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

--- Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:


> 
> Cultural neutrality in Lojban comes down to creating a language that
> is easy for anyone of any culture or language to use. A large
> component of this is not using a single language as the base, because
> odds are, that language will be harder for one segment of the audience
> to learn, and easy for another.
> 
> Favoring Lojban over other languages is acceptable. Lojban's
> phoneme-set is supposedly simple for one of any culture/language to
> learn, and offers variant pronounciations. 90% (arbitrary figure) of
> people should have no problems pronouncing Lojban. That all their
> phonemes are not included is no big deal.
> 
> Neutrality isn't about including every language, giving every language
> a part to play (as if people will be sore that their language isn't
> included), it's about making Lojban easy for everyone to speak.

Still one would hope that cultural neutrality was more than having a phoneme set that was easy for
everyone to pronounce  -- it sounds like something important and exciting.  And, of course, Lojban
is not too good on even this: every base langauge has a problem with at least one phoneme and some
with many more.  And once you get off that top half dozen or so, the problems multiply.  And then
there are those consonant clusters, which are problems altogether for some languages and
particular ones for most.  To get a really "neutral" phonology you have to go to something like
toki pona, with only the five vowels and just ptkslnmy (spelled j)w.  No initial clusters, no
double vowels, only syllable final is n (pronounced m before p and never occurring before m or n)


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