From C.J.Fine@BRADFORD.AC.UK Ukn Aug 2 13:12:48 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Mon, 2 Aug 1993 13:12:46 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 1921; Mon, 02 Aug 93 13:11:33 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 4108; Mon, 02 Aug 93 13:11:34 EDT Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1993 18:08:05 +0100 Reply-To: Colin Fine Sender: Lojban list From: Colin Fine Subject: Re: logban ' To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: Message-ID: And says: ++++++++++> If one were to prefer to increase recognizability by stamping out harmless variation, there already exists harmless variation in Lojban orthography which could be stamped out. For example, on the whole the presence of spaces between words is optional, but for me it takes time to spot that something is not a lujvo but a concatenation of several cmavo. Me being liberal, I accept this, but on the antivariationist principle there ought to be rules making it obligatory to concatenate or not concatenate words. Such rules would not be necessary for the grammar to work, but they would aid recognition. >+++++++ This is a very good point, and I am not sure what to do with it. I often write collocations of cmavo as single words (and always do in a motivated way, ie I separate words that do not belong in the same structure). And indicates that it is inconsistent for me to do so, having objected to h for '. I am tempted to try writing my lojban without joining cmavo at all for a while, and see what happens. There is another form of allography to which this is related, and that is the optional use of punctuation symbols (?, < etc) - they are redundant but (probably) permitted, and I have sometimes used them myself, though not consistently. By design, these are unnecessary - the words convey all the structure and the metasemantics of these symbols. But why were they invented? Because people found it hard to read without? Or because people felt uncomfortable writing text without them? Or because somebody thought it would be a good idea. In a way, I see them - and univerbation of cmavo - as a prop of the same nature as using a questioning tone of voice when we speak a question in lojban. We have sometimes wilfully misunderstood each other when the intention was clear from the tone of voice, but the lojban said something different (I believe this has happened in DC too). I shall experiment for a while with using no non-verbal punctuation (including '.', which is also optional) and no univerbation. I shall be interested to see what difference this makes to readers. (Last year I once posted a text in which I divided words only at pauses and after brivla. I didn't explain that this was the rule I was following, so people legitimately could not read the text unambiguously; but I got the impression that they didn't find it at all easy to read) Colin