Re: Lojban Orthography (has been several other things)

[mark@kli.org]

>From: Pycyn@aol.com
>Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 11:54:06 EDT
>
>From: Pycyn@aol.com
>
>Enough of this airy-fairy orthographic fights, even if they are about the 
>work of
>reasonably proficient linguists.  Let's think about orthographies for real 
>languages here. Most of the features that have been suggested exist in at 
>least one set of real
>orthographies, the Indic, e.g. Devanagari, for which typesetting facilities 
>already exist
>(though I don't know the name of any of the various versions).  Ligatures are 
>available for almost any combo you like but are generally fairly transparent, 
>vowels can be collapsed to diacritic dimensions within words or expanded to 
>the same size as consonants, semivowels exist in both consonantal and 
>vowel-like forms, . and ' have natural -- and appropriately sized -- 
>expressions, diphthongs have special forms quite different from vowel 
>sequences, etc. etc.  And very few forms are easily confused with one 
>another, despite sharing a history with Hebrew, Armenian and Siamese 
>orthographies, of which the muddle factors are often claimed.

Mmm... Let's see how Devanagari fares in my own experience...

For ' I presume you mean the visarga (the thingy that looks like a colon)
which has a similar sound; for ., um, the virama?  The little vowel takeout
marker?  Hmm.

Thing is, the ligatures aren't so neat and tidy as we'd hope.  There isn't
really every possible conjunct ligature; sometimes you fall back on virama
to make them.  Especially when dealing with a foreign language (like
Lojban) which may construct clusters alien to Indic languages.  [OBTW, take
everything I've said and will say with the following proviso: my exposure
to Devanagari is (almost) strictly via Sanskrit; other languages may have
some different solutions.]  Also, a few of the conjuncts aren't so
transparent, which I guess isn't a big deal.

In Sanskrit, you hardly ever have vowels abutting one another, even with a
visarga present, so I'm not even sure how you're *write* it in Sanskrit.
Use the initial/isolated form of the vowel after the hiatus?  I think Hindi
does something like that.  Since Sanskrit would require a virama after any
word that ends on a vowel (if it put spaces after every word, which it
doesn't necessarily), that matches well with virama == {.}, at least after
cmene (not at all before vowel-initial words, though; that won't have an
analogue).  It'll look like really strange text no matter what, since you
pretty much HAVE to break after each word in Lojban, unless you mark
stress, and that looks *weird* in Devanagari, with all those tiny words.

The vowel-hiatus gets weird with diphthongs too... Devanagari has *true*
semivowels; wouldn't use its vowels that way.  And the rising diphthongs
even worse.  Falling diphthongs, SOME are written as vowels (ai, au), some
are not (ei, oi).  Erk, we can't even use the existing semivowels for
rising diphthongs, since the [w] is also what you'd have to use for [v].

Devanagari is too well-suited to its sandhi to do Lojban *well*.  But it
surely can do it somehow.  Let me poke at it a bit.

~mark