One of Lojban's design goals is audio-visual isomorphism, one-to-one mapping of speech and writing. I think this goal is a very important one and worth to be aspired. Lojban has this feature to 95%, but why not 100%? There seems to be no good excuse. It's just lazines. The way I see it is this: For speech streams and streams of letters to be 100%ly phonemic and isomorphic, there has to be one letter per sound and vice-versa. Therefore, having i/u behave like approximants in some cases and as vowels in others as well as allowing glottal stops, which are part of the speech stream, to be elided from writing seems horribly inconsistent to me and is an unnecessary concession. What follows from this is the only reasonable solution, and that is to have a writing system that maps to speech 100% in the following way:
Here's a sample text using this system:
lo sònci be bu'u lo bùmru
ni'o lo dàplu no'u la. gont. zi'e noi sèlpau pa cmàna ku po'o noi lo galraìpau be ke'a cu gàlmau lo vilbì'e se bikydà'i berstunyxàmsi lo mìnli cu zìlsau lo ka gùgde lo màfcre .i vei na'e bo so'u lo nànmu xàbju be la. gont. cu clìva lo za'u tcàdu pe lo gàltu ma'arbì'i ge'u joi lo jàrki je mànku zbàni te zu'e lo nu go nai sèlfu lo tùrni be lo dàplu tùtra bu'u lo ri tcàdu lo ka termàkfa gi'o nai màfcre gi mu'i lo zancapsèlfri cu lìtru te ka'a pa dàplu se ka'a lo dràta gi'e pìlno lo màkfa bu'u pi ro lo tùtra pe la tedyxàmsi .i cmìma ro lo bi'u nai prènu —sei so'o da cu jìnvi— fa de poi lo dràta cu te cmène fi ke'a fe zo cpinìsu zi'e po'u lo bàlrai .i je'u tràji lo ni lìtru kei gi'e zanselfù'a lo nu bìnxo lo dràkytru kei gi'e ba za bo se cmicù'a bìnxo lo ralmàfcre .i ba'e fu'e la me la. ged. selsà'a fu'o .e so'i dràta selsà'a cu te lìsri lo ra nunzù'e [...]
In addition, here are the UI that use approximants:
ŭa, ŭe, ŭi, ŭo, ŭu
ĭa, ĭe, ĭi, ĭo, ĭu
The diphthongs:
All of [ɪ j i] and [ʊ w u] are legal realizations of the final V in a {.VV}, which suggest there being an additional phoneme for each of those groups. It cannot be analyzed as a consonant in terms of morphology. A VV counts as a single vowel, just the way it should be for a diphthong. The ĭ represents the consonantal approximant, which, in Lojban, is only important within a CV context, e.g. {ĭu}.
ụ ị
Will rewrite this article soon
- Nothing that is pronounced must be omitted in writing. This includes glottal stops as well as stress(!)
- Spaces must not matter. Speech streams contain no whitespaces, they segment because of stress and clusters. Therefore, every written text must be unambiguously parsable with and WITHOUT spaces. This means that any text must be written in a way that doesn't require the spaces for it to segment properly. Spaces are TRULY optional (unlike now, where spaces are optional only as long as you watch out for bullshit exceptional stress marking). Since now spaces are truly optional, they are only there to facilitate reading the text, not to enable it.
- Give every sound a SINGLE phonemic letter. iu becomes ĭu, ua becomes ŭa. This also makes it less confusing for people that never understood why denpa bu is not needed before approximants.
Here's a sample text using this system:
lo sònci be bu'u lo bùmru
ni'o lo dàplu no'u la. gont. zi'e noi sèlpau pa cmàna ku po'o noi lo galraìpau be ke'a cu gàlmau lo vilbì'e se bikydà'i berstunyxàmsi lo mìnli cu zìlsau lo ka gùgde lo màfcre .i vei na'e bo so'u lo nànmu xàbju be la. gont. cu clìva lo za'u tcàdu pe lo gàltu ma'arbì'i ge'u joi lo jàrki je mànku zbàni te zu'e lo nu go nai sèlfu lo tùrni be lo dàplu tùtra bu'u lo ri tcàdu lo ka termàkfa gi'o nai màfcre gi mu'i lo zancapsèlfri cu lìtru te ka'a pa dàplu se ka'a lo dràta gi'e pìlno lo màkfa bu'u pi ro lo tùtra pe la tedyxàmsi .i cmìma ro lo bi'u nai prènu —sei so'o da cu jìnvi— fa de poi lo dràta cu te cmène fi ke'a fe zo cpinìsu zi'e po'u lo bàlrai .i je'u tràji lo ni lìtru kei gi'e zanselfù'a lo nu bìnxo lo dràkytru kei gi'e ba za bo se cmicù'a bìnxo lo ralmàfcre .i ba'e fu'e la me la. ged. selsà'a fu'o .e so'i dràta selsà'a cu te lìsri lo ra nunzù'e [...]
In addition, here are the UI that use approximants:
ŭa, ŭe, ŭi, ŭo, ŭu
ĭa, ĭe, ĭi, ĭo, ĭu
The diphthongs:
All of [ɪ j i] and [ʊ w u] are legal realizations of the final V in a {.VV}, which suggest there being an additional phoneme for each of those groups. It cannot be analyzed as a consonant in terms of morphology. A VV counts as a single vowel, just the way it should be for a diphthong. The ĭ represents the consonantal approximant, which, in Lojban, is only important within a CV context, e.g. {ĭu}.
ụ ị
Will rewrite this article soon
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