Jim Henry, On 25/11/2011 05:22:
> I was planning to use a visually-distinct subset of the printable
> ASCII characters, that is, including some punctuation and digits, but
> excluding characters too similar to each other -- I was going to use
> lowercase 'l' (since it's on the home row) but not capital 'I' or '1'
> or '!', for instance, and zero '0' but not capital 'O' (since the
> latter requires use of the shift key).  I decided on 85 characters,
> and probably a five vowels/seventeen consonants system, but that was
> as far as I got before leaving off work on it for a while.  I also
> considered a system with eight vowels and eleven consonants, and
> three potential syllables not occurring because of phonotactic
> constraints.

Why 85? Given that the two options were 5*17 and (8*11)-3, it sounds as though you'd decided in advance you wanted 85. but there are more than 85 visually distinct ASCII chars, and more than 85 visually distinct chars inputtable on a standard keyboard (aren't there?).

I fancy that an ASCII syllabary would be suited to the sort of engelang--auxlang hybrid that Loglan/Lojban are -- i.e. one aiming for easy usability and adoptability alongside the usual engelang goals. In such a conlang, I'd deffo go for 7 vowels (a,e,i,o,u,y,@), but I've never settled on a definite inventory of consonants, but probably they'd comprise m,n,l,f,s,x,p,t,k,i,u with possible addition of v,z,g. So c77 or c98, but I'd probably exclude iu and ui (using ii+uu and uu+ii instead), giving 75 or 96.

--And.