I assume it was JCB's idea, since Lojban inherited it from Loglan.
It's not as crazy as it may seem though, given that:
I meant the letter /c/ in general, not its usage in Lojban (which matches its usage in a number of other transcription systems).
> as it could be, phonetically, /s, k, or
> tc/. My gut reaction is to go for the sound over the actual letter.
Ouch! What's the point of using the codes then?
Because the codes make an excellent starting point. If we leave the letters the same, regardless of pronunciation, we lose the autonymic component.
> In terms of the ISO codes, the original idea (in my head, at least) would be
> to have the fu'ivla forms based on the ISO to as large as an extent as
> possible, but fully acknowledging that it might not always be.
If the transformation ISO -> fu'ivla is not univocal and preferrably
reversible, it loses most of its appeal, at least for me.
Fair enough, although it would actually be imposible to do it this way, since at least some of the lang codes have illegal clusters, or no vowels at all. Some of them will have to be tweaked to fit.
> Developing these isn't really all that hard. Here's a sample of what I came
> up with earlier, which took maybe 20-30 minutes. In all of the below,
> everything before the ' is derived as much as possible from the language
> code, the second part from the language family ISO code.
> Language name in English (native name) fu'ivla (actual language ISO
> code/language family ISO code)
> Afar (Afaraf) fra'afa (aar/afa)
> Albanian (Shqip) ski'ine (sqi/ine)
> Amharic (-amharinynya-) xma'afa (amh/afa)
This one fails. "xm" is not a valid initial. ".amxafa" works fine though.
> Argonese (Argonés) gra'ine (arg/ine)
Why not ".argine"?
I was trying to keep the CCV'VCV structure for all of them....
> Assamese (অসমীয়া) sma'ine (asm/ine)
> Belarusian (Беларуская) ble'ine (bel/ine)
> Breton (brezhoneg) bre'ine (bre/ine)
> Chechen (нохчийн мотт) tce'acu (che/cau)
OK, don't let me stop you. :)
Well, it's fun and all, but I'm not terrible interested in doing all of this if people don't think it's worthwhile/won't be using it. I have much better, productive things to spend my time on.