Re: [lojban] Re: la .alis.

[And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>]

A belated contribution from me to this thread, because I felt obliged to read every message in it and related threads before posting. Two remarks, one on audiovisual isomorphism and the other on user-selected orthography.

Audiovisual isomorphism
It seems to me that the invocation of the principle of audiovisual isomorphism in support of objections to typographically rich settings of Lojban have been tending to the ludicrous. The principle of audiovisual isomorphism is that within the rules that define Lojban, every significant element in the phonology has a counterpart in the orthography and every significant element in the orthography has a counterpart in the phonology. But that principle holds only within the rules that define Lojban. Consider the paralinguistics of spoken Lojban -- pitch, tempo, loudness, voice quality, and so forth: nobody insists on speaking Lojban in a staccato monotone in defence of audiovisual isomorphism, because everybody quite rightly realizes that these are *paralinguistic* and outside the scope of Lojban phonology. Similarly, we should understand that typography is paralinguistic and outside the scope of Lojban orthography.

User-selected orthography
Hopefully, technology will make it increasingly possible for readers to select their preferred orthography. (For a language such as English, this would be an immense boon to learning readers, who would gain and extra year or more to learn and play in, that would otherwise have been learnt in mastering current English orthography.) My preferences would be these:
1. Acute accent for stress. Capital letters not adjacent to another capital letter (or perhaps to any other letter at all) are, like numerals, logographic (for abu, by, etc.), as in xorxes's usage. Other capital letters could be used for typographic function.
2. Have <.> when flanked by letters signify /./, and leave other <.> for typographic (or between numerals, logographic) functions. 
3. Treat opening and closing quotation marks as logographs for _lu_ and _li'u_.
4. Treat all other punctuation as purely typographical.
5. For aesthetic and space-saving reasons, change {i|u}{a|e|i|o|u} to {y|w}{a|e|i|o|u} and {a|e|o}{i|u} to {a|e|o}{y|w}, and get rid of all apostrophes from the orthography.
(These preferences are purely hypothetical, I should add, because I can't readily foresee my actually returning to reading Lojban.)


--mie And

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