Orthography

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

>if the orthography were being
>designed from scratch, which system would one choose? If that
>were the question being asked generally, and properly debated
>and voted on, then I might be more inclined to go with the collective
>choice.

There was a time, albeit long ago, where this is exactly what occurred.
Specifically, the first weekend of serious work on the language.  Since this
 weekend, I had over one of the other original Lojbanists, Gary Burgess, who got
together that last weekend in May 1987, we discussed this very thing (in the
context of your alternate usages of y and w and h, and he more clearly than
I remembers that these specific ideas were debated and discussed, and
eventually were ruled out over the course of the weekend.  We aren't sure of
the final reasons for everything, but the h vs. ' was definitely because
of a) the fact that the buffer is not a regular letter of the Lojban alphabet
but rather a filler sound, and the choice f symbols was specifically to
contrast with the comma and period which were other ways of separating vowels.
The one-sound/one-letter would have made it unacceptable to use "loi" for
"lo'i" because the buffer sound IS required, and "loi" does not imply that
 omoitted sound to a novice, but rather would be produced as what you call "loy"
 by
most people new to the language.  JCB did not have such a syllable separator,
and this led to constant debates over which VV pairs were one syllable and
which were two syllables, and what happened to penultimate stress when a
CVV occurred at the end of the word.  We felt strongly that the two syllable
wioth separator VV pairs needed to be clearly marked.  Having done so THEN
made possible the loi/lo'i contrast, and the opportunity to increase overloaded
cmavo space was irresistable.

Meanwhile, it was argued that "loi"
could be pronounced as a diphthong and probably would be, or it could be
pronounced as a glided slur from "o" to "i", and the result would sound like
an American Southern drawl of the diphthong.  (the fact that the fourth original
Lojbanist, Tommy Whitlock, is from South Carolina and has a pronounced
accent of that type made this obvious.  Thus we had no need of a separate
letter under the one-sound/one-letter argument since we clearly had an
allophone situation.

But these werekind of final rationales, and we cannot remember all the
little tradeoff arguments that went before them.  Status quo was almost
certainly something that was considered, but I don't think thattoo much that
weekend was determined by status quo, since we made a LOT of changes from
TLI Loglan standards.  Inertia was NOT what goverened decisions and
choices, but inertia HAS kept us from being willing to endlessly reconsider
changing them  once the decisions were made.  JCB's Loglan community spent
altogether too much time debating phonology and morphology compared to other
far more important and undsettled issues in the language.  There is no
optimal solution to these problems, so 4 people including 2 with linguistics
training sat down and made decisions on the basis of that knowledge coupled
woth awareness of the problems that had been found with the earlier efforts.

lojbab
----
lojbab                                                lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                        703-385-0273
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