Re: [lojban] Novel written system that parallels the logic of Lojban?

[Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org>]

On Thursday, November 22, 2012 18:24:28 Sebastian wrote:
> But what about people from India, Arab countries, China etc? are they equal
> eager to use the Roman alphabet? Maybe they are (like we would had to learn
> chinese if China were the dominant force of the world). In that case I
> should quit arguing right now, because then I speak of other people's
> behalf.

Most Indic languages and some others in the area are written with an abugida 
of about 50 letters, which distinguishes some phonemes that need two letters 
or some diacritics to distinguish in the Latin alphabet. Even though many 
letters are written in two ways, the Indians aren't likely to give it up.

Similarly, the Arabic alphabet distinguishes emphatic consonants, and as 
vowels are less semantic in Semitic languages, they are often omitted. But the 
Turks, who used to use the Arabic script, switched to Latin because the Arabic 
three long and three short vowels did not match well the Turkish cube of eight 
vowels.

Other writing systems you may want to look at are Thai/Lao, Khmer, and 
Tibetan, all derived from some ancestor of Nagari. Thai/Lao/Khmer have 
repurposed the voicing or aspiration distinction for tones or vowel quality, 
and Tibetan spelling has remained largely fixed as the pronunciation has 
changed, so none of them match up spelling to sound well. But all of them have 
a simple way to map Sanskrit or Pali spelling, which is important to these 
peoples, so they're not likely to give up their abugidas.

Lojban phonetics are a pretty good match to the Latin alphabet. Let's keep it.

Pierre
-- 
loi mintu se ckaji danlu cu jmaji

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