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[The formatting here has been mangled a bit by my numerous attempts to send this message. This is my fifth attempt. Die, Yahoogroups.] I'm on vacation this week and don't have access to my usual e-mail, but I must speak up against this horrendous vowel system. Diphthongs like "ea" and "ey", or "ao" contrasted with "au", simply should not exist. These are the reason Lojban switched to ai, ei, oi, au, V'V as its only vowel combinations. V.V, with a glottal stop between the vowels, sounds much uglier to me than V'V with an h-sound. But now I see that neither should be necessary. Why make new letters for [dZ] and such? This was my idea in the C(C)V(V) form. CC does not include CW. So this would allow for both "jai" and "djai", assuming j is changed to be the single phoneme [Z] like it should be. Here's what I believe the CC combinations would be, though I must be forgetting some: dj dz jb jd jg jv sf sk sp st ts xf xk xp xt zb zd zg zv (Those x-combinations are ugly as heck. If only x were c.) So, these plus the 13 consonants yield 32 initial consonant sounds. Then these could be combined with the vowels: a e i o u y ai ei oi au ia ie io iu iy ua ue ui uo uy for 640 possible cmavo*, even more than is necessary for Lojban, and all of them one syllable (though they could be pronounced as two with no ambiguity). I wasn't considering combinations like ia, ie, ua, ue, etc. when I originally devised this, thinking that words like "xpue" would be too diffcult to pronounce, but in comparison to other proposals this is downright easy. In response to something different: Lojban does not have separate words for uppercase letters, as there is no reason to refer to uppercase letters. There is a shift word that makes the next letter uppercase (tau, I think) and another that is a sort of "caps lock". As far as I know these have never been used. Lojban certainly does not have separate words for Greek letters, and it astonishes me that Loglan did. What possible justification would there be for taking up 25 words like that? Did people hold Greek spelling bees in Loglan? Lojban uses .alfas. bu, and so on. There is also a "Greek lock" which has also never been used. Now that the numerous bounces of this message have given me a chance to read more e-mail, it seems that Rex is going full speed ahead with Greek-letter words. *Why?* Is there some wonderful use for these that I'm missing? The consonants are by, cy, dy, etc. The vowels are .a bu, .e bu, etc. ' is y'y. I think that y (schwa) as the vowel to attach to consonants works rather well. Something like "eu" (I refuse to call this "eo") would grow tiresome when pronouncing acronyms... Now that Rex has changed his position on glottal stops, perhaps it would be possible to accept .NN* (one or more non-consonants after a pause/glottal stop) as a cmavo form. This would allow for more small words, and also allow the space of words to not be as "packed". * It is rather strange to be calling these words "cmavo" in the context of Ceqli. What's Ceqli for small+word? _____________________________________________________________ Run a small business? Then you need professional email like you@hidden.email from Everyone.net http://www.everyone.net?tag