[lojban] Audio-Visual Isomorphism, Phonemic Orthography

[Matt Arnold <matt.mattarn@gmail.com>]

xorxes,

Alphabets are, generally speaking, all phonemic orthographies. Just
far less consistently phonemic.

Audio-visual isomorphism means each letter has only one sound*, and
each sound has only one letter. Other languages have letters that are
supposed to make unrelated sounds, or sounds created by unrelated
letters, based on different circumstances. Lojban does not do this.
That is how it is described in our publications. Maybe the term is
silly, but it tends to be explained in every reference material.

-Eppcott

* "One sound" defined realistically. It does not mean that everyone
speaks "i" the same, and it never claims that it does. Lojban
accommodates close sound variations that are created by inexpert
pronunciation or the shape of different people's mouths. In practice,
there are a functionally nigh-infinite number of fine-grained variants
on phonemes. Far more than can be distinguished except to expert ears.
To exclude every one of these thousands of indistinguishable variants
is impractical and can never be achieved. I consider every "i" variant
to be legal, so long as it is consistently and easily distinguishable
from "e", "a", "o" or "u".



2010/3/28 Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 9:19 AM, Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com> wrote:
>> Robin said:
>>
>>> That is, he wanted it to look like this:
>>>
>>> Mi klama la Bast,n. I la Bab cusku "lu mi klama li'u"
>>
>> Not quite. But I'd be very interested to talk with people about the various options one might have for punctuation markup.
>
> Punctuation markup has been used for Lojban texts in the past,
> although not quite in that way.
>
>>> Caps at start of sentences, quote marks, a few other things I can't remember.
>>
>> Caps for proper names (la Alis), and anomalous stress marked by acute accents rather than by capitalization (which is thereby freed for other use). Near as I can tell the only word in the text affected by this is "la meri,An" ("la Meri,Án" or "la Meri,án"; the original is "Mary Ann").
>
> I'm all in favor of not using caps to mark stress. The acute accent is
> fine for me, but unnecessary. I don't think caps for proper names is
> such a good idea though.
>
>> I find long paragraphs with no clear visual indication of sentence boundaries to be bewildering. I am sure that computers and savants find it quite simple to parse. I as a multilingual trained linguist expert in writing systems, I still find it much easier to navigate the language when standard Latin-script conventions are used.
>
> The sentence separator ".i" is visually quite distinct though. It may
> be that I'm just too used to Lojban by now, but I find caps at the
> start of Lojban sentences more distracting than helpful. Would you
> have the ".i" capitalized, or the first letter of the following word?
>
>> In for a penny, in for a pound. Full stops are not necessary; they are redundant. So too are quotation marks, and since anomalous stress can be more congenially marked with the acute accent (as in Spanish) than by SHOUTING, there's no reason an edition of a text could not choose to do that, and thereby permit capital letters to be used, redundantly, to mark the beginnings of sentences, proper names, and whatnot.
>
> Personally, I like to reserve capital letters for letter names, so "A"
> instead of "abu", "B" instead of "by", and so on, just like "1" can
> stand for "pa", "2" for "re" and so on. It would be interesting to see
> how the Alice text looks with that convention, given the use of letter
> names as pronouns,
>
>
>> Lojban's "audio-visual isomorphism" is extremely cool.
>
> I wish someone would explain what "audio-visual isomorphism" is
> supposed to mean. Is it something more than "phonemic orthography"?
> There is and never has been any strict isomorphism between the spoken
> and the written forms of a Lojban text, as far as I can see. Why are
> Lojbanists so fond of crazy terminology?
>
>> But centuries of Latin typographic practice have evolved because those practices are *useful* to readers (as useful as the full stop) and I can see no reason not to pursue my project just because you and a few others on IRC, "umm, kinda told me where to stick" the idea.
>
> Please do pursue it. (The full stop is not used in Lojban as in the
> Latin typographic practice though.)
>
>> I would appreciate it if anyone who *is* interested in this would say so, as I'd like to discuss the options regarding redundant markup of quoted material.
>
> I'm interested.
>
> mu'o mi'e xorxes
>
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