[lojban] Re: Orthography

[Brandon Wirick <brandon@yrick.com>]

All right, you've encouraged me to take this seriously and help to
create a truly great digital/script orthography (I'll call it a DSO
from here on out.) I worked some things out and I have some new ideas.

For reference (in hex),
--40--
20--10
--08--
04--02
--01--

I think for the sake of a clear, unambiguous digital readout, the
first of the 0x7F to go would be those that don't span the entire
space horizontally and vertically (0x24 and 0x12 look identical.)

Also, I really like the idea of 0x40 flagging capital letters. I count
23 continous characters with values less than 0x40 (i.e. without the
top bar.) Three of these are horizontally symetrical, leaving ten
pairs of mirrored characters. Conveniently, there are 23 Roman letters
in the Lojban alphabet. These 23 "lower-case" characters correspond to
23 "capitalized" characters with 0x40 added.

I don't have time to draw it up right now, but I would recommend using
0x3E ('H') for {xy}, becuase it just fits; 0x3F (upside-down 'A') for
{my} because that would fit nicely with {py} and {by}, the other
bilabial consonants being assigned to 0x2F ('b') and 0x1F ('d') in
either order; and 0x37 ('U') for {ny} because that would fit nicely
with {ty} and {dy}, the other dental consonants, being assigned to
0x27 (which looks almost like 't') and 0x17 (which looks almost like
'd'). Conveniently, {ly} and {ry} are closer to dental plosives than
any other plosives, so assigning them 0x25 ('L') and 0x13 (backawards
'L') makes sense.

>From there, all characters greater than 0x30, as well as two
characters that are not, go to the vowels, and all the other
consonants need to find whichever leftover pairs make the most sense.
I'm leaning towards making all the unvoiced consonants be greater than
0x20 and all the unvoiced consonants be less than 0x20, except for
{xy}, although it would make {by} look like 'd' and {py} look like
'b'. As for {xy}, if Aleksej is right, even if it accidentally is
pronounced voiced, it would count as {xy}.

There are seven additional continous characters that would not be
continuous if 0x40 were subtracted. These may be used to encode {denpa
bu}, {slaka bu}, {y'y}, and even {ga'e y'y}.

The script will have to take a more convoluted form of the digital
characters, because some of those characters are hard to write with
the fluid motion of the pen. Oh well; that's a totally creative task
and a subject for another e-mail.

mu'omi'e.uirik.


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