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

[cbmvax!uunet!prc.unisys.com!dave]

If A and Alpha are distinguished only by the alphabet-shift letteral,
why does Aleph get a name of its own?  Is it because upper-case A and
upper-case Alpha have the same glyph?  If so, I don't like this,
because everybody uses the lower-case alpha to avoid this confusion.
("Everybody" meaning people who use Greek letters in formulae; I don't
know any Greek language.)

In my experience, the primary use for the non-English alphabet letters
is in writing mathematical formulae.  Hence the main criterion for
letteral names is that they be easily read in that context (which
might involve a LOT of alphabet shifts!).  I think whatever letteral
scheme is adopted ought to pay close attention to this issue.

Japanese kana come in two flavors: Hiragana and Katakana (not sure of
my Anglicized spelling...).  These aren't alphabets, but
_syllabaries_, one glyph per syllable.  [If you conclude from this
that the Japanese must use many fewer syllables than we do, you're
right.]  Hence, each already has a pronunciation and an obvious
Roman alphabet (Romanjii) spelling.  Now, I don't offhand know whether
they are all "legal" Lojban syllables, but most names have to get
seriously mangled in order to be legal Lojban.

On another issue: not being a physicist, I don't use femto- a whole
lot, but as a computer scientist, nano- and pico- and giga- are part
of my everyday vocabulary (and tera- is starting to be).  Let's not
cripple the language for scientific use.  Stay close to the metric
system, provide convenient ways to say things like "1.36^24" and
"(alpha) A (beta) --> B".