3.12 Oddball Orthographies
Lojban English ai “pie” ei “pay” oi “boy” au “cow” ia “yard” ie “yes” ii “ye” io “yodel” (in GA only) iu “unicorn” or “few” ua “suave” ue “wet” ui “we” uo “woe” (in GA only) uu “woo” iy “million” (the “io” part, that is) uy “was” (when unstressed)
3.12 Oddball Orthographies
The following notes describe ways in which Lojban has been written or could be written that differ from the standard orthography explained in the rest of this chapter. Nobody needs to read this section except people with an interest in the obscure. Technicalities are used without explanation or further apology.
There exists an alternative orthography for Lojban, which is designed to be as compatible as possible (but no more so) with the orthography used in pre-Lojban versions of Loglan. The consonants undergo no change, except that x is replaced by h. The individual vowels likewise remain unchanged. However, the vowel pairs and diphthongs are changed as follows:
- ai, ei, oi, au become ai, ei, oi, ao.
- ia through iu and ua through uu remain unchanged.
- a'i, e'i, o'i and a'o become a,i, e,i, o,i and a,o.
- i'a through i'u and u'a through u'u are changed to ia through iu and ua through uu in lujvo and cmavo other than attitudinals, but become i,a through i,u and u,a through u,u in names, fu'ivla, and attitudinal cmavo.
- All other vowel pairs simply drop the apostrophe.
The result of these rules is to eliminate the apostrophe altogether, replacing it with comma where necessary, and otherwise with nothing. In addition, names and the cmavo i are capitalized, and irregular stress is marked with an apostrophe (now no longer used for a sound) following the stressed syllable.
Three points must be emphasized about this alternative orthography:
- It is not standard, and has not been used.
- It does not represent any changes to the standard Lojban phonology; it is simply a representation of the same phonology using a different written form.
- It was designed to aid in a planned rapprochement between the Logical Language Group and The Loglan Institute, a group headed by James Cooke Brown. The rapprochement never took place.
There also exists a Cyrillic orthography for Lojban which was designed when the introductory Lojban brochure was translated into Russian. It uses the “а”, “б”, “в”, “г”, “д”, “е”, “ж”, “з”, “и”, “к”, “л”, “м”, “н”, “о”, “п”, “р”, “с”, “т”, “у”, “ф”, “х”, and “ш” in the obvious ways. The Latin letter “y” is mapped
