History: Arabic Orthography

Source of version: 1 (current)

I (mi'e filip.) thought of using Arabic letters to write Lojban. The consonants are pretty straightforward, especially if you use Persian rather than Arabic as a base (which adds __g__, __j__, __p__, and __tc__, of which we need the first three). I thought of using the existing vowel signs for the Lojban vowels. Since Arabic has only three signs compared to Lojban's six vowels, I thought of using the "doubled" signs (-n endings) for the "real" vowels and "single" signs for "close" vowels -- that is, vowels which aren't the same as the standard Arabic vowel but which are sometimes represented with the same vowel sign anyway. This gives kasra/kasratan for e/i, damma/dammatan for o/u, and fathatan for a. This leaves y to go with fatha. I propose using alif for __.__ since it's a glottal stop, and heh for __'__ because of the pronunciation. I couldn't think of anything particularly good for __,__ so I picked ''yeh with hamza''. I also need a "null" consonant for diphthongs to carry the second vowel sign; I picked `ayn. So here's my proposal. What do you think? [http://shavian.org/lojban/lojban-xrabo.png] ''Doesn't look bad - and it seems you are using front, middle, end and single type variants of Arabic (Farsi) characters. Yet, it also seems you didn't do this by normal typing but by composing the samples by means of a graphic tool ;-) I therefore think that - different from Yiddish mode - it is a hard job to 'really use' Arabic for Lojban writing. Nevertheless, nice idea. -- .aulun.'' *I did indeed use a tool -- [http://www.unipad.org/|SC UniPad] which automatically shapes Arabic letters (and does RTL automatically for Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, too). The screenshot is from UniPad. *''Great! Without need of extra fonts. Yet, Macintosh again excluded :(( --.aulun.''