Hanzi for Lojban is an excellent notion (has it already been
entertained?) Hanzi are probably better-suited to Lojban than the Latin
alphabet is, and possibly better-suited to Lojban than they are to
Chinese. A fixed, *closed* number of roots, each representable by a
single figure, none needing to be related to the others... Sounds good
to me.Each gismu should have a single official graph, as close as possible in
meaning. It will never be perfect, but the mapping of sounds to Latin
letters isn't perfect either, to an English-speaker. Rafsi use exactly
the same graph, as you propose, except they're linked together to make
lujvo. It's reminiscent of the distinct on/kun readings in Japanese,
where they have different pronunciations if they're in compound or other
environments. I don't like your ^ because it separates as much as joins,
and since there won't be spaces between the graphs in general (or will
there?) you wind up with lujvo-elements that are more visually separated
than adjacent words. Something like a COMBINING DOUBLE INVERTED BREVE or
COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE BELOW would be nice, though I'm not sure applying
such non-Han diacritics to Han characters doesn't qualify as an unholy
abomination. Something small, some little separator that joins more than
it separates... Maybe something like ˌMODIFIER LETTER LOW VERTICAL LINE
or ˈMODIFIER LETTER VERTICAL LINE, squeezed between the rafsi-graphs?Presumably specific graphs for the cmavo as well. There we lose the
cmavo/brivla distinction that the Latin writing system gives, with the
consonant clusters. (what might be cool is to take the cmavo-graphs from
katana/hiragana, which are visually distinct from the Han graphs, but
then you'd wind up straying pretty far from pronunciation and meaning).And yes, some kludgy whatever for cmene and fu'ivla (these also suffer,
by never being able to reduce the markedness of being written all funny).~mark
Hanzi for Lojban is an excellent notion (has it already been
entertained?) Hanzi are probably better-suited to Lojban than the Latin
alphabet is, and possibly better-suited to Lojban than they are to
Chinese. A fixed, *closed* number of roots, each representable by a
single figure, none needing to be related to the others... Sounds good
to me.Each gismu should have a single official graph, as close as possible in
meaning. It will never be perfect, but the mapping of sounds to Latin
letters isn't perfect either, to an English-speaker. Rafsi use exactly
the same graph, as you propose, except they're linked together to make
lujvo. It's reminiscent of the distinct on/kun readings in Japanese,
where they have different pronunciations if they're in compound or other
environments. I don't like your ^ because it separates as much as joins,
and since there won't be spaces between the graphs in general (or will
there?) you wind up with lujvo-elements that are more visually separated
than adjacent words. Something like a COMBINING DOUBLE INVERTED BREVE or
COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE BELOW would be nice, though I'm not sure applying
such non-Han diacritics to Han characters doesn't qualify as an unholy
abomination. Something small, some little separator that joins more than
it separates... Maybe something like ˌMODIFIER LETTER LOW VERTICAL LINE
or ˈMODIFIER LETTER VERTICAL LINE, squeezed between the rafsi-graphs?Presumably specific graphs for the cmavo as well. There we lose the
cmavo/brivla distinction that the Latin writing system gives, with the
consonant clusters. (what might be cool is to take the cmavo-graphs from
katana/hiragana, which are visually distinct from the Han graphs, but
then you'd wind up straying pretty far from pronunciation and meaning).
And yes, some kludgy whatever for cmene and fu'ivla (these also suffer,
by never being able to reduce the markedness of being written all funny).
--~mark