Hallo!

R A Brown wrote:

> > [Plan B]
> 
> Ah, that's why I couldn't find 'Plan A'     :-)

Add to this that "Plan B" is, at least in German, an idiom meaning
`a backup plan one takes recourse to when the first attempt has failed'.

> But what occurred to me reading the article again is why if Jeff is
> using an alphabet of just sixteen letters, and each letter can be
> encoded uniquely as four bits, why he did not simply use hex digits.
> 
> While it is, for example, no surprise to find |b| pronounced as /b/, it
> is kind of odd to find it has an allophone /E/.

Of course, it has its own "logic", in extracting, for most of the
letters, both values from the same English words.  The result are
vowel/consonant pairings that are entirely arbitrary, and the vowel
inventory being patently English.  Bugger.

>       One might find using
> what are clearly not alphabetic symbols, i.e. hex digits, more
> acceptable for their dual vowel/ consonant function.

Yes.  A better solution for the Plan B phonology would be to have
16 consonants that are always pronounced as consonants, and a rule
that inserts epenthetic vowels to make the whole thing pronouncable
(e. g., insert [a] after each odd-numbered consonant counting from
the start of the word, thus breaking it up into CVC syllables,
with a CV syllable at the end of the word if the number of consonants
is odd - so /bpfklp/ is pronouned [bapfaklap] and /trdbm/ is
pronounced [tardabma]).

> I recall that Srikanth used numeric digits with dual pronunciations in
> his Lin; but while, if they occurred between consonants they were all
> pure vowels (no diphthongs as there are apparently with Plan B), when
> they occur next to a vowel they are not consonants - as in Plan B &
> Max's 'weird idea') - but determine both the length and the tone of the
> adjacent vowel.   Weird    :)

Aren't the phonetic values of Lin symbols a secondary representation
of a telephathic language?

Greetings,

Jörg.