Re: [lojban] Re: Initial impression

[Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com>]

A couple of thoughts, as a newbie (and a linguist). (Have I posted on
this list before, or just been lurking?  If I haven't posted yet, hi!)

On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 19:52, Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 1. First, the usage of punctuation marks for pronounciation aides is
>> confusing and looks simply ugly.
>
> They're not punctuation, they're letters.  Letters are quite arbitrary
> in general, there's nothing odd about having a couple of letters that
> are small dots.

I have to agree with the other newbie on this point, although Stela is
certainly correct that letters are arbitrary, and the "punctuation"
symbols in Lojban count as letters rather than punctuation.

Nonetheless, most of the letters in Lojban represent a sort of happy
medium between the ways different languages with a Roman alphabet use
the letters--/t/ isn't just like English /t/, but it's similar enough
for speakers to get an idea of the sound.  But, with the
English-punctuation Lojban letters, this isn't true, and any effort
towards it seems to have been tossed by the wayside.

I don't have much issue with the apostrophe used for an /h/ (except,
perhaps, that in most languages that use an apostrophe, and in
linguistics, it represents a glottal stop).  But, whatever, this is
fine with me.  What I **hate** is the period.  Try as I might, I just
can't be looking through a Lojban text and not see these as periods.
This despite the fact that languages as diverse as Arabic, English,
and Japanese/Chinese (which use a circle on the line instead of a
dot), use a period for punctuation, and not as a character.  (If it
was any later, I'd probably argue that there's something psychological
happening here, with tiny little bits just not looking quite like full
letters...)

> We've had various scripts invented in the past few years, it's been
> fun.  None have caught on yet in any big way, just a few posts here
> and there to the Jbotcan, but it's always possible.

I've come up with a system I rather like, that gets rid of all of
these little punctuation marks (so annoyed was I with the period :p),
but I can't make it pretty enough to share.

> All languages do violence to each other's names, I'm afraid.

I'm not sure I agree with this.  Although it is certainly true that
languages do violence to names when they pronounce them, or when
converting them from another writing system, they do this in writing
much less frequently--English speakers don't rewrite the Spanish name
'Juan' as 'Whann', for example.  Nonetheless, Lojban does at least
have built-in outs for this.

I do wonder about this as Lojban grows and expands, though.  I
wouldn't be surprised if people stop doing this to names eventually,
and just use people's names when talking...

Chris