Phonology should be significantly optimized for aesthetics, as long as the loglangishness doesn’t suffer. The sheer ugliness of Lojban is IMO a big reason why it’s not as popular as it should be. As a second point on the “optimize for popularity” topic, if there’s ever a conflict between ease of pronounceability for English speakers versus any other language, err on the side of English.
Having any character not in the a-z range has two major drawbacks – the first is that it’s going to be really annoying to type for a vast amount of people. Typing “Ņ” with my Swedish keyboard requires me to do the awkward hand movement of pressing AltGr+, then releasing the keys to press Shift-N. I’d rather have it be any other character that’s available.
Secondly, and this applies to the apostrophe too, is that a lot of things that has to do with computers doesn’t deal with those characters very well. Anything with e.g. an apostrophe will be hard to google for, it will often need escaping if it’s inserted in a string, and likely won’t be useable as tokens (e.g. a variable name in programming languages, a browser user-agent, computer usernames...) – and even in the cases where it is usable, it requires ugly hacks to get working (domain names, filenames).
Hm, you’re right about the apostrophe. Toaq and Eberban use the apostrophe for the glottal stop. Lojban uses the period. What other glyph do you suggest? x? Of the letters in the English alphabet, the following are not used by Sekko: j f v w x.
Yeah, x seems the most appropriate candidate. It sufficiently rare in English to not trip people up too much, from a cursory glance at Wikipedia it’s at least used for that purpose in Pirahã, and it even looks like a little pictographic “stop” symbol.
Edit: Oh, apologies, I completely misunderstood the part where “ņ” was actually written with the letter “q”. Nevermind that part!
Lukewarm takes:
Phonology should be significantly optimized for aesthetics, as long as the loglangishness doesn’t suffer. The sheer ugliness of Lojban is IMO a big reason why it’s not as popular as it should be. As a second point on the “optimize for popularity” topic, if there’s ever a conflict between ease of pronounceability for English speakers versus any other language, err on the side of English.
Having any character not in the a-z range has two major drawbacks –
the first is that it’s going to be really annoying to type for a vast amount of people. Typing “Ņ” with my Swedish keyboard requires me to do the awkward hand movement of pressing AltGr+, then releasing the keys to press Shift-N. I’d rather have it beanyother character that’s available.Secondly, and this applies to the apostrophe too, is that a lot of things that has to do with computers doesn’t deal with those characters very well. Anything with e.g. an apostrophe will be hard to google for, it will often need escaping if it’s inserted in a string, and likely won’t be useable as tokens (e.g. a variable name in programming languages, a browser user-agent, computer usernames...) – and even in the cases where it is usable, it requires ugly hacks to get working (domain names, filenames).
Hm, you’re right about the apostrophe. Toaq and Eberban use the apostrophe for the glottal stop. Lojban uses the period. What other glyph do you suggest?
x? Of the letters in the English alphabet, the following are not used by Sekko:j f v w x.Yeah,
xseems the most appropriate candidate. It sufficiently rare in English to not trip people up too much, from a cursory glance at Wikipedia it’s at least used for that purpose in Pirahã, and it even looks like a little pictographic “stop” symbol.Edit: Oh, apologies, I completely misunderstood the part where “ņ” was actually written with the letter “q”. Nevermind that part!