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alternative orthography - response to Mark



John posted his proposal without the obvious explanation for it, which
I will add.  It hopefully takes care of all of Mark's criticisms.

The alternate orthography is a mapping from Lojban back to the original
orthography of Loglan, with a couple of things that JCB added after the split
like the doubled letters for syllabic consonants.  Thus, JCB used "ao" for
the diphthong that we write in Lojban as "au".  JCB doesn't use apostrophes
in non-diphthong VV pairs.  (he has never addressed the problem that we
resolved through the devoiced glide).  He uses 'h', but 'x' as a distinct
phoneme is found only in names, whereas historically, Loglan considered our
'x' to be an allophone of 'h'.

IN short, the proposal is a way to write Lojban so that it looks more like
any other version of Loglan, and hence may be more palatable to JCB.  I
don;t think that any Lojbanist considers any of the alternatives MORE
desirable than what we do now - we made the changes because we think that the
actual Lojban orthography better reflects the way people will speak the
language.  But having an orthography that looks more 'normal' to JCB is an
advantage in trying to reach a long term solution to our differences -
something that I think we have always sought.  By having a set of standard
mappings between the two orthographies, it becomes relatively trivial for
someone to write a program that can spit out text in one orthography in the
other form.  Thus TLI Loglanists have to do a minimum of relearning to be
able to start participating in the Lojban community, should such be a workable
part of the resolution of our differences.

hope this explains things a little better.

lojbab