From lojbab@GREBYN.COM Fri Jul 30 01:04:30 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Fri, 30 Jul 1993 01:04:28 -0400 Received: from YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 1355; Fri, 30 Jul 93 01:03:16 EDT Received: from YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU (NJE origin LISTSERV@YALEVM) by YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU (LMail V1.1d/1.7f) with BSMTP id 6733; Fri, 30 Jul 1993 01:03:14 -0400 Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1993 01:02:12 EDT Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: h vs ' X-To: rpb@PANIX.COM X-Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: Message-ID: Because there is a visual orthographic reason - ' is NOT an "alphabetic character" in the strictest sense of the word, in Lojban. Lojban was also not designed to be encoded in other programming languages (some people want to see if Lojban could itself be a programming language, of course), and most utilities I've used that did not come from unix originally have had no trouble with the apostrophe. Most languages use non-alphanumeric characters for orthogrphic and diacritic functions, which is what they are used for in Lojban. I notice, BTW that apostrohe is also used in your Irish sig line. (Irish as written by some people is even more irritating because they write one diacritic on the line previous in order to have it "above" the character it modifies. This is really bad when you print in most non-Courier fonts, not to mention all manner of other editors. Is there as good a reason for this convention as there is for the Lojban convention, especially given that most languages with diacritics manage to get by with writing them before or after the modified character in some form or another?) We catered to computer people (or rather typists and computer people) by making a language that can be typed on all standard keyboards that have a Roman alphabet, and I believe without a shift on any of them (I don't know all foreign keyboards, of course). The few capitals used in the language are the only exception, and they strongly mark a word as non-Lojban as a result. Given that apostriphe is used for similar purposes in other languages made it seem a most reasonable thing to do, and the lack of problem I have with using iwith virtually all of my computer-based activities shows that it is indeed a operating system/language dependency. Since automated computer processing can easily replace apostrophe with "h" which is used for no other function, this should be no more difficult a function than the more typical one in computer processing of having to use upper/lower case shifts to make normally interchangeable equivalents compare as equals (of course unix violates the norms in that regard as well by being case sensitive, but while my antipathy for unix makes me not unhappy that Lojban conflicts with it, unix was not a factor in the design of the language in any way (I didn't know anything about unix in 1986-7). lojbab