Unofficial alphabet lists for Lojban/Latin/English, Greek, and Russian

["Mark E. Shoulson" <cbmvax!uunet!CTR.COLUMBIA.EDU!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!shoulson>]

I dunno.  Some of those seem kind of arbitrary.  I guess they have to be.
I suppose there'd be no ambiguity between lojban '=y'ybu and English/Latin
h=y'ybu?  What about English apostrophe?  Maybe {srana bu} as in
possession, or {tordu bu} for contraction?  Would that conflict with
something for breve?  That'd likely be a nonce-word anyway.  Why not
{.uybu} for "w"?

Will there be some conflict with Cyrillic {.iebu} for "ye" or {.iobu} for
"yo"?  I mean, we use {.uibu} or {zo'obu} for smileyface, maybe {.iobu}
would be taken as some symbol of agreement.  Is {cybubu} really even a
valid lerfu?  BTW, don't all the "xybu" lerfu really need to be "xy.bu", to
avoid getting taken for consonant cluters or something?  Especially when in
mid-sentence.

For the Hebrew Alphabet, do you want separate names for the hard and soft
forms of the letters that have hard and soft forms (presence/lack of weak
dagesh)?  Like bet/vet, kaf/chaf.  Not all these differences are observed
by every dialect, but some are near-universal (like kaf/chaf).  Shin and
Sin really don't alternate, even though they differ only in a dot.  They
probably deserve separate lerfu, though I'm not an authority on their
history.  Modern Hebrew pronounces tzadi as {ts}, Esp "c".  Maybe {tsybu}
would be clearer?  Is that a legitimate lerfu?  On Zipfean grounds, I
should point out that tof is much more common than tet, and thus deserves
the shorter lerfu.  Similarly, tzadi has it all over samekh, and I think
even Sin is more common.  Samekh is pretty rare.  Will you want final
forms?  The forms are considered more distinct than, say, Arabics 3 or 4
forms per letter depending on where in the word it is.  On admittedly rare
occasion, it becomes important whether it's final (some numerologists
assign different values to the final letters).  The vowel system in Hebrew
is fairly complex.  There are even two vowels which are written *exactly*
the same, but technically are distinct, and some (like me) even pronounce
them differently.  What about the "hyphenated" vowels?  I'll discuss this
with you offline.

I can swing Devanagari also, though only the Sanskrit letters, not those
used only in later Hindi.

~mark (shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu)