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

[Frank]

Since lojban is based on predicate logic, I would think the notation of p.l. already constitutes such a system to a large extent, no?

On Tuesday, November 20, 2012, charli...@gmail.com wrote:

Greetings everyone,
This is my first time visiting the forums...
My curiosity currently lies in the possibility of a written system that could be developed around Lojban that respects its logical nature.
As far as I can tell in my rudimentary beginnings as a student of Lojban: The language is designed around phonetics in a similar way to Japanese. by that, I mean that the language uses predictable and consistent combinations of vowel and consonant phonetics in the structure of the constituent word-forms.

Preposition: In written Lojban, what if you used a character system similar to Japanese hiragana and katakana: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana  &  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana
Japanese Katakana and Hiragana are based on characters which hail from ancient cultural influences, but what if you started fresh and designed characters around some kind of logical analysis of Lojbanic structure, syntax, logic, etc. such that the characters are themselves always internally consistent and logical? Pictorally speaking, you have many variables to draw upon: stroke length, angle, curvature, dots, rotation/orientation, etc. certainly as many variables as are needed to accurately represent the phonetics, syntax etc. of the language. In this way, entire gismu might have a chance of being reduced to single characters which LOOK and FLOW as logically as they behave.

Thoughts?

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[Jonathan Jones]

Google "larlermorna".

--
mu'o mi'e .aionys.

.i.e'ucai ko cmima lo pilno be denpa bu .i doi.luk. mi patfu do zo'o
(Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )

[Michael Turniansky]

  Actually, Jonathan, I would have dismissed it too, as "oh, great, another suggestion for a writing system"  But this one was actually different.  It's suggesting that rather than a simply one-to-one substitution of the existing orthography to another letter-based system, that we basically give each brivla a single symbol, based on things such as place value, so that, for example, each of the danlu gismu might look similar, since they have similar terbri.   It's an intriguing suggestion, but I doubt there's much support for it.

             --gejyspa

[Jonathan Jones]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 10:46 AM, Michael Turniansky <mturn...@gmail.com> wrote:

  Actually, Jonathan, I would have dismissed it too, as "oh, great, another suggestion for a writing system"  But this one was actually different.  It's suggesting that rather than a simply one-to-one substitution of the existing orthography to another letter-based system, that we basically give each brivla a single symbol, based on things such as place value, so that, for example, each of the danlu gismu might look similar, since they have similar terbri.   It's an intriguing suggestion, but I doubt there's much support for it.

             --gejyspa

I wasn't dismissing it. I told him to Google larlermorna because that writing system is similar to what he described.

I agree that there isn't likely going to be much support for such a system.
 

[Michael Turniansky]

But I disagree that it is similar.  Larlermorna (which I use for my gmail avatar) is based on letters/phonemes, as are all the alternate orthographies.  Charlicopter was suggesting a system built around "Lojbanic structure, syntax, logic, etc."  Completely different idea.

      --gejyspa

[Jonathan Jones]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 11:00 AM, Michael Turniansky <mturn...@gmail.com> wrote:

But I disagree that it is similar.  Larlermorna (which I use for my gmail avatar) is based on letters/phonemes, as are all the alternate orthographies.  Charlicopter was suggesting a system built around "Lojbanic structure, syntax, logic, etc."  Completely different idea.

Based on the fact that he uses the Japanese Kana as a reference, it sounds to me like another phoneme orthography to me.
 

[Jonathan Jones]

...and I said "to me" too many times in that sentence....

[.alyn.post.]

I've wanted to explore a system like that for a a Signed Exact
Lojban signing/writing system, since the 'alphabet' of signed
language is so much larger.

http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban+Sign+Language

mi'e .alyn.

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 01:00:00PM -0500, Michael Turniansky wrote:
> But I disagree that it is similar. *Larlermorna (which I use for my gmail

> avatar) is based on letters/phonemes, as are all the alternate

> orthographies. *Charlicopter was suggesting a system built around
> "Lojbanic structure, syntax, logic, etc." *Completely*different idea.
> * * * --gejyspa
> On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 12:54 PM, Jonathan Jones <[1]eye...@gmail.com>

> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 10:46 AM, Michael Turniansky

> <[2]mturn...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> * Actually, Jonathan, I would have dismissed it too, as "oh, great,
> another suggestion for a writing system" *But this one was actually
> different. *It's suggesting that rather than a simply one-to-one

> substitution of the existing orthography to another letter-based
> system, that we basically give each brivla a single symbol, based on
> things such as place value, so that, for example, each of the danlu

> gismu might look similar, since they have similar terbri. * It's an

> intriguing suggestion, but I doubt there's much support for it.

> * * * * * * *--gejyspa

>
> I wasn't dismissing it. I told him to Google larlermorna because that
> writing system is similar to what he described.
>
> I agree that there isn't likely going to be much support for such a
> system.

> *

>
> On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 11:34 AM, Jonathan Jones
> <[3]eye...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Google "larlermorna".
>

> On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 4:43 PM, [4]charli...@gmail.com
> <[5]lanter...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Greetings everyone,
> This is my first time visiting the forums...
> My curiosity currently lies in the possibility of a written system
> that could be developed around Lojban that respects its logical
> nature.
> As far as I can tell in my rudimentary beginnings as a student of
> Lojban: The language is designed around phonetics in a similar way
> to Japanese. by that, I mean that the language uses predictable
> and consistent combinations of vowel and consonant phonetics in
> the structure of the constituent word-forms.
>
> Preposition: In written Lojban, what if you used a character
> system similar to Japanese hiragana and katakana:

> [6]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana* &*
> [7]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana

> Japanese Katakana and Hiragana are based on characters which hail
> from ancient cultural influences, but what if you started fresh
> and designed characters around some kind of logical analysis of
> Lojbanic structure, syntax, logic, etc. such that the characters
> are themselves always internally consistent and logical?
> Pictorally speaking, you have many variables to draw upon: stroke
> length, angle, curvature, dots, rotation/orientation, etc.
> certainly as many variables as are needed to accurately represent
> the phonetics, syntax etc. of the language. In this way, entire
> gismu might have a chance of being reduced to single characters
> which LOOK and FLOW as logically as they behave.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> --
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> [10]lojban+un...@googlegroups.com.

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> [11]http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.

>
> --
> mu'o mi'e .aionys.
>
> .i.e'ucai ko cmima lo pilno be denpa bu .i doi.luk. mi patfu do zo'o
> (Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )
>
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>
> --
> mu'o mi'e .aionys.
>
> .i.e'ucai ko cmima lo pilno be denpa bu .i doi.luk. mi patfu do zo'o
> (Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )
>
> --
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>

> References
>
> Visible links
> 1. mailto:eye...@gmail.com
> 2. mailto:mturn...@gmail.com
> 3. mailto:eye...@gmail.com
> 4. mailto:charli...@gmail.com
> 5. mailto:lanter...@gmail.com
> 6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana
> 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana
> 8. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/lojban/-/RSMpezF6avUJ
> 9. mailto:loj...@googlegroups.com
> 10. mailto:lojban%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com
> 11. http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en
> 12. mailto:loj...@googlegroups.com
> 13. mailto:lojban%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com
> 14. http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en
> 15. mailto:loj...@googlegroups.com
> 16. mailto:lojban%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com
> 17. http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en
> 18. mailto:loj...@googlegroups.com
> 19. mailto:lojban%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com
> 20. http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en

--
.i ma'a lo bradi cu penmi gi'e du

[MorphemeAddict]

How does the current standard orthography not meet the aims of your proposal? 

stevo

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 6:43 PM, charli...@gmail.com <lanter...@gmail.com> wrote:

Greetings everyone,
This is my first time visiting the forums...
My curiosity currently lies in the possibility of a written system that could be developed around Lojban that respects its logical nature.
As far as I can tell in my rudimentary beginnings as a student of Lojban: The language is designed around phonetics in a similar way to Japanese. by that, I mean that the language uses predictable and consistent combinations of vowel and consonant phonetics in the structure of the constituent word-forms.

Preposition: In written Lojban, what if you used a character system similar to Japanese hiragana and katakana: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana  &  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana

Japanese Katakana and Hiragana are based on characters which hail from ancient cultural influences, but what if you started fresh and designed characters around some kind of logical analysis of Lojbanic structure, syntax, logic, etc. such that the characters are themselves always internally consistent and logical? Pictorally speaking, you have many variables to draw upon: stroke length, angle, curvature, dots, rotation/orientation, etc. certainly as many variables as are needed to accurately represent the phonetics, syntax etc. of the language. In this way, entire gismu might have a chance of being reduced to single characters which LOOK and FLOW as logically as they behave.

Thoughts?

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[Sebastian]

Latin orthography has the advantage of many people in the world know about it, it's being used a lot in scientific contexts, it's compatible with ASCII, etc.

Negative: Latin letters are not cultural neutral, they've got history and are a part of West's cultural "colonialism" or what you would to call it.

There is no ortography associated with natural language that is cultural neutral, therefore I think it's a great idea to construct a completely new set of characters, with no history (yet).

When constructing this character set you may, or may not, be inspired by existing writing systems like hangul, japanese, devanagari, arabic etc etc., but I think the result should be something completely different.

Tengwar has the advantage of not being so real-world cultural biased, but it's still not uniquely associated with lojban. I think lojban shouldn't borrow cultural signs from other, fictional or non-fictional, but have their own lojbanic (global) cultural system.

Next question is: phonemic or ideograms? The advantage of phonemic characters is they're not so many. I like 

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[Sebastian]

...Next question is: phonemic or ideograms? The advantage of phonemic characters is they're not so many. I like "larlermorna", it looks great and seems to be pretty easy to use, but it hasn't the systematically phonetic system as tengwar has.

Ideograms does not take up as much textual space as phonemes does and they might look cool (I think the visual impression really matters). And it's probably possible to construct them intelligently, as charlicopter suggested to represent information about lojbanic structure (arity (place structure), abstractions, descriptors, modifiers etc), by means of "stroke length, angle, curvature, dots, rotation/orientation, etc."

Toki pona got their own set of hieroglyphs, so why not lojban?

Negative: There are ba'e a lot of them, which need to be constructed (toki pona got 123, lojban need at least 1800 + complex lujvo forms; and what about fu'ivla?). Phonetic information may get lost in a ideogram system, if not each character also contain all the phonemes of each word, but then the characters would be fairly complex.

mu'omi'e jongausib

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[Michael Turniansky]

  larlermorna does indeed have (some) system to the letters -- for example, the mirroring of the voice with their unvoice equivalents.  But there have been plenty of other lojban orthographies, too. For instance see http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Original+lojban+orthography Or for that matter, read about ALL the various attempts at alternate orthographies.  http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Alternate+Orthographies  Quite frankly, the advantage of using an existing orthography that most people in the world are already familiar with (which is used by an EXTREMELY wide range of cultures all over the world) always far outweighs people's resistance to having to learn an entirely new orthography, so proposals always fizzle out.

               --gejyspa

[Sebastian]

Well, I agree that it's comfortable that most people are familiar with latin characters. But that simply mirrors the fact that Europe/US had been very succesful in spreading their ideas and culture to the rest of the world pu ze'ucaku by means of their greater economic, political and cultural dominance (= cultural and economic colonialism). McDonalds, CocaCola, Apple and Hollywood-produced movies are integrated in an extremely wide range of cultures too nowadays. Lojbanic culture has the potential of becoming something else than an extension of the euro-american global monoculture I think, to create something of their own. The reason why lojbanists doesn't critize latin script on these grounds might be something for a sociologist to analyze. But until we've got a succesful ortography, that most lojbanists could agree on, I think latin characters will do just fine.

mu'omi'e jongausib 

So I don't necessarily think 

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[MorphemeAddict]

On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 10:48 AM, Sebastian <so.co...@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, I agree that it's comfortable that most people are familiar with latin characters. But that simply mirrors the fact that Europe/US had been very succesful in spreading their ideas and culture to the rest of the world pu ze'ucaku by means of their greater economic, political and cultural dominance (= cultural and economic colonialism). McDonalds, CocaCola, Apple and Hollywood-produced movies are integrated in an extremely wide range of cultures too nowadays. Lojbanic culture has the potential of becoming something else than an extension of the euro-american global monoculture I think, to create something of their own. The reason why lojbanists doesn't critize latin script on these grounds might be something for a sociologist to analyze. But until we've got a succesful ortography,

Lojban already has a successful orthography. Any other orthography will be unsuccessful. 

stevo

[Michael Turniansky]

  "euro-American monoculture"?  Interesting, interesting.  So you think that not only is the USA  like Canada, but  is like England is like France is like Germany is like Spain, is like Sweden is like Finland is like Romania is like Solvakia?  Hmm...  I have several thousand years of wars during which time they were using Latin-derived alphabets that says you are just wrong.    Now, granted, they were using that BECAUSE of conquest, and many other cultures who didn't have written languages (aboriginal Oceanians and Pacific Islanders, native American tribes, many African cultures, Vietnamese) had it spread to them by colonialism (either actual, or "cultural and economic), but that doesn't mean their cultures are any less diverse.  And yes, some cultures who did have their own writing system came to  use it informally (i.e.Japanese romaji or Pinyin) due to a combination of ease in use with telegraphic systems.  But please don't confuse the Roman alphabet with English.  That's a separate issue. Lojban isn't American, and it isn't European. And the fact that we happen to use a writing system that's derived from the same writing system that is in use by billions of people in all parts of the globe speaking (writing) hundreds, if not thousands of languages is enough cultural neutrality for me.

          --gejyspa

On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 10:48 AM, Sebastian <so.co...@gmail.com> wrote:

[la gleki]

The main problem, pe'i, is that most users can't change their keyboards to something different.

But in the nearest future we all will use smartphones/computers with holographic keybords that will be able to display any symbols.

Therefore, the author has the point. And we should reject such proposals.

[Sebastian]

Well, I got your point. I'm not good at expressing the nuances well when I'm speaking english; I wish I could express what I would like to say in swedish instead or being better at lojban. So I admit that I to some extent mistakenly confuse America/Europe with the Roman alphabet. But anyhow there HAS been a historical process of cultural ideas from Greece/Rome to Europe and then as a part of colonialisation. And the relations between cultures are seldom symmetrical.

You're talking about small cultures without writing systems which have benefited from the introduction of the Roman alphabet. That's a good thing.

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.

But there's a simple solution to all this, so we don't have to argue. Anyone who wish can construct an ortography for lojban. If a lot of people use it, then it becomes standard. If people rather would like to continue using the Roman alphabet so fine. 

The proposition that any alternate ortography will not become succesful in the future can't be proved yet.

But even if other ortographies won't be standard, I think some of them are rather cool, and useful in the right contexts. 

I'm going to paint the "butterfly world map" (watermanpolyhedron.com/index) on a wall in our house, using larlermorna or tengwar for geographical names (with lojban names in Roman under each). That's a good use of alternate ortographies at least: to get some additional visual flavor.

fe'omi'e jongausib

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[Jonathan Jones]

On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 8:48 AM, Sebastian <so.co...@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, I agree that it's comfortable that most people are familiar with latin characters. But that simply mirrors the fact that Europe/US had been very succesful in spreading their ideas and culture to the rest of the world pu ze'ucaku by means of their greater economic, political and cultural dominance (= cultural and economic colonialism). McDonalds, CocaCola, Apple and Hollywood-produced movies are integrated in an extremely wide range of cultures too nowadays. Lojbanic culture has the potential of becoming something else than an extension of the euro-american global monoculture I think, to create something of their own. The reason why lojbanists doesn't critize latin script on these grounds might be something for a sociologist to analyze. But until we've got a succesful ortography, that most lojbanists could agree on, I think latin characters will do just fine.

You need to get your facts straight. McDonald's et al. have nothing to do with the proliferation of the Latin orthography. That shit got spread long before commercialism existed as even an idea, back when Europe- mostly Britain and France- were spreading themselves throughout the world conquering lands in the Imperial days of yore- of which the U.S. was but one example, not a participant.
 

--

[Pierre Abbat]

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