From lojbab@GREBYN.COM Thu Jul 29 23:37:40 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Thu, 29 Jul 1993 23:37:39 -0400 Received: from YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 1156; Thu, 29 Jul 93 23:36:27 EDT Received: from YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU (NJE origin LISTSERV@YALEVM) by YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU (LMail V1.1d/1.7f) with BSMTP id 5990; Thu, 29 Jul 1993 23:36:25 -0400 Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1993 23:34:59 EDT Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: logban ' X-To: jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU X-Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: Message-ID: "h" will never be the preferred for for ' because it makes the language harder to learn. It is also, as I said on conlang, changing a rational design decision for the benefit of computers, which many are opposed to on general principles (though I understand that jimc is not so opposed). I do not understand the "invisibility" of apostrophe to Mark Shoulson, unless people who have written to him don't very clearly handwrite. Most significant punctuation marks are quite easy to see if reasonably handwritten, and in the case of Lojban, this symbol can only appear in a very limited set of conditions (between two vowels in a single word), and is only significant for those vowel pairs which can be interpreted as dipthongs. I invented the apostrophe, and remain quite proud of it. Most design decisions about Lojban were either inherited from JCB, or pretty much made necessary by circumstances. We could have done something other than an apostrophe, and perhaps even done something other than make a dichotomy between divowel and diphthong, but I remain convinced that it was the best design decision possible. My antipathy for unix no doubt helps in maintaining this attitude, but I haven't had any compaints from any people OTHER than unix users (or C programmaers in general) in any case. lojbab