Proposal for an original orthography for Lojban, by Lakmir. April 2008:
Notes:
- Flick diacritic: The 'flick' diacritic loosely represents vocalisation. I know the relationships described by these letters don't reflect that perfectly, namely l+r and n+m. My 'first draft' justification for those is that they're very closely related letters which naturally bond in pairs, so I have just marked them with the flick for the time being.
- Stroke diacritic: The 'stroke' loosely represents the fricative property. Hence the technically inappropriate grouping of ' and x.
- Glottal stop: In deciding on a cursive script, I had the idea of a 'line starter', which evolved into the idea of having two styles of {.}. The 'pre' style goes with words which are spelt with . at the start, eg attitudinals and connectives, and the 'post' is for anything that end with one. Some words could have both. {.i} looks cool too.
- Sibilant family: s, c, j and z form a special relationship under the 'flick' and 'stroke' concepts, forming a quadrangle thus:
ie: s is to z as c is to j, and s is to c as z is to j.
Other things of note:
- ' and y were designed specifically to visually break up vowels and consonants, respectively
- The script is intended to be written a word at a time, and then marked (in the fashion of dotting i's and crossing t's in cursive latin)
Some examples:
post by la bret. on the community blog recently, run together with no spaces:
Let me know what you think, either here or lojban-list, or both. This is only draft so I'm open to radical suggestions.
Also super sorry for spamming the wiki-update subscribers! Didn't realise I was doin' that. I'm new.
.u'usai
