On Monday, August 25, 2014 11:51:44 AM UTC-4, And Rosta wrote:
You are looking at letter frequencies, which is only a dim and distorted reflection of phone frequencies, too dim and distorted to be worth wasting time over, I think.
Actually I wasn't. That site just makes it easy to get a rough overall sense of it. I took into account, as much as could, the difference between grapheme and phoneme. That's why I gave the link to the Russian alphabet. But I have also been listening to samples on Youtube of dozens of language. So while you make a good point, I do not think it "too dim and distorted" to be of no consideration.
Vowels are auditorily more distinct than consonants, but are less stable diachronically. Having vowels as the frequentest phones strikes me as an optimal design feature for an engelang.
I disagree. When people make spelling mistakes it is almost always the vowels they get wrong. And it is the vowels that tend to drift from dialect to dialect. Nonetheless I think the vowel usage it Lojban is that abnormal.
Your idea that having atypical letter or phone frequencies renders a language incapable of being widely spoken strikes me as lacking rational or empirical basis. Your thesis is not formulated clearly enough for it to be possible to cite counterexample.
It's not incapable of being spoken. I think it is incapable of "catching on" due the dissimilarities. Its an open question whether there is a significant physiological reason that common phonology has evolved the way it has.