Re: [lojban] Re: Initial impression

[Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 03:03, Oren <get.oren@gmail.com> wrote:
> Lojban looks really strange? Indeed indeed indeed... and I feel that goes
> along nicely with 'being culturally neutral'

But being strange and being culturally neutral are completely
different things.  A monolingual speaker of English can also look at a
text in Japanese or Chinese (assuming it is written left-right) and
get some sense of the structure from the punctuation.  Likewise with,
say, Arabic, assuming said speaker knows about the writing direction
difference.  But with Lojban, there simply isn't anything that lets
you structure the text in this way, and the things that you think
should structure the text (like periods and commas) are doing
something totally different.  You can be culturally neutral without
making it extremely difficult to parse a text from sight...

> P.S. Actually, I'm also really interested in alternative alphabets or
> standardized fonts/ color-coding ideas, but I keep being drawn back to the
> universality of ascii, since I don't really see a substantial objective
> argument against it.

I agree that something else would probably be best, although it does
have the problem of not being as "universal," although in the era of
Unicode and easily-modified keyboard layouts, I'm not sure that the
universality of the Latin system should be a motivation to not try and
develop something new..

Chris