Re: [lojban] Re: BBC on "Spell As You Pronounce Universally"

The problem is not the alphabet, but the use of it. English is a horrible (though not the worst apparently) example. It uses (inefficiently) 26 letters for 40+ (varying with dialect) phonemes, most sounds can be spelled at least two ways, many more toward a dozen, and many spellings have more than one pronunciation. This all is largely untrue in Finnish, for example, and in several other languages which regularly revise the official spelling to meet the changing pronunciation (while trying, with considerable lack of success, to keep the pronunciation shifts from happening). English, with over a hundred *recognized* dialects and no authoritative central control, has no chance of doing any of this. Nor would a phonetic alphabet help -- it would simply make the various dialects as mutually unintelligible in written form as they are in spoken (I leave the captions on for all BBC shows now). We are essentially in the Chinese position, with a written language which we all share (more or less, the Commonwealth has a slightly different version, as Taiwan does in the Chinese sphere), which we read by shape without too much attention to the details, but which gives murky clues to pronunciation. The most a phonetic alphabet would do would be to make out treatment of foreign words a little more respectful.

From: la gleki <gleki.is.my.name@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sunday, April 28, 2013 5:25 AM
Subject: [lojban] Re: BBC on "Spell As You Pronounce Universally"

On Sunday, April 28, 2013 1:25:39 PM UTC+4, tijlan wrote:

An article that may be of interest to jbopre:

"Could a new phonetic alphabet promote world peace?"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21505114

Some quotes:

"The reason why Finland shines in education is because their children have to spend very little time learning to read and write. It is completely phonetic."

"Utopian language projects, in which an artificial system is put forward as an alternative to what's developed naturally, tend to fail. People are strongly attached to the distinctiveness and idiosyncrasies of whatever language they use."

"Shared language can dupe us into thinking we share other things - values, beliefs, goals - when in many cases we don't. Does it minimize differences, or merely mask them?"

There is such a thing as IPA. I don't think it's hard to learn Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew alphabets.

If you need Indian languages learn their alphabets.

Next, I don't want to replace Chinese script with pinyin or similar derivations. It causes problems even for Chinese that are already forgetting how to write characters due to excessive use of pinyin-enabled keyboards.

Next, such apps like MultiLing O keyboard for Android allow to enter text in any alphabet. And they contain dictionaries now even for Lojban.

Lastly, alphabet wouldn't change much. One would still have to learn all those languages with old alphabets. You can't remove the written history of humanity and autoconversion from one alphabet into another is still out of question cuz we have plenty of paper books.

If you need a unified language that would retain expressive power of other languages including even math notation (that is also a language)

then you need Lojban or it's derivatives. Other methods that I know would fail or have already failed.

mu'o

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