Re: [lojban] Proposal for Katakana Lojban orthography.

[tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com>]

Some Japanese jbopre have attempted the Katakana transliteration for gismu and cmavo on the jbo-pon dictionary (http://www.editgrid.com/explore/user/tijlan/%E3%83%AD%E3%82%B8%E3%83%90%E3%83%B3%E8%BE%9E%E6%9B%B8) which i host on my EditGrid account.

I myself am a Japanese speaker and have a good command of its orthography. Katakana, like Hiragana, is a syllabary, meaning that it's not cut out for representing single consonants. Every brivla has a consonant cluster, and no Katakana except { ン } [n] can adequately represent that. Cmavo, on the other hand, have no such cluster and can at least by principle be accommodated by a syllbary. More suited for brivla -- content words -- is Kanji, the logograms. For example:

mi carna
ミ　回

ta tricu cmana
タ　木　山

Logograms, when you know them, are a great potential for speed reading.

Katakana, however, has other difficulties in substituting for ASCII. It doesn't distinguish /r/ and /l/, for instance. As you've shown above, { ri } and { li } both become { リ }. { 'a } and { xa } become { ハ }. And so on. One workaround may be to use Hiragana for one of each pair. Say, { ri | り } (Hiragana) & { li | リ } (Katakana), and { 'a | は } (Hiragana} & { xa | ハ } (Katakana}. And certain syllables would have to be represented with two letters, such as { cu | シュ }, which is a combination of { シ } and { ュ }, which is the smaller of { ユ }. It can get quite complicated for non-natives.

moklu gi'e pimlu
口　ギへ　羽

finpe vi lo rirxe midju
魚　ヴィ　ろ　川　中

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.