katakana orthography

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If we had a katakana orthography (not like I expect that to be easy) we might could appeal to the anime crowd. Just a thought.

  • Jay Kominek:
    • That is an awfully interesting idea. Might even be possible. How would consonant clusters be done, though?
    • Hell, how would any C not followed by V be done? And what do you do with the n consonant symbol? Give it to "n" or "m"?
    • .aulun.:
      • Awfully fancyful people around here ;-) : Don't like Katakana as much as I'm fond of Hiragana (Firakana)!
      • But speaking honestly, for what rational reason should a syllabic alphabet like this, tailored for a language with a very special phonemic system like Japanese, be adjusted for Lojban? - But yes, it would be very, very nice to have it. So I was playing around a bit with Fontographer and a Hiragana font to maybe get some idea... Yet, it's horrible a task:
      • E.g. we needed to modify characters for lb, c, l, f and x - l maybe by adding a nigori to "r", f by using the "h", unless we don't take that for x. We'd have to invent some more diacritical marks beside "nigori" and "maru" (at least one for kind of "schwa" to indicate the syllable as being "vowelless" (i.e. being a consonant).
      • So, don't think it's impossible... (... for doing your Lojban poems in Hiragana calligraphy - let us fetch some ink, brush and paper...)
  • You can use the Japanese people's double-kana tricks for writing fa, fi, fe, fo, for instance.
    • How does this work?
      • Try "fu" plus a small vowel kana.
      • And as for Lojban x, I think the Japanese try to imitate this sound by putting a small "tsu" in front of a kana such as "ha". So xa would be "(small tsu) (ha)".
  • Mediator64
    • I created a full kana orthography for Lojban, with hiragana for native Lojban words and katakana for names and foreign words. You can see it at la kanas cu vlaleci'e la lojban I did not think having a ton of small vowel kana would make sense in Lojban, so I made it into an alphabet, rather than a syllabary.
    • If anyone knows Lojban or Japanese, please feel free to edit and add a Lojban translation.