Message-Id: <199510011110.HAA25245@locke.ccil.org>
Date:         Sat, 30 Sep 1995 22:50:48 -0400
Reply-To: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Subject:      h for apostrophe
To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
Status: OR

>The motivation is partly aesthetic, and partly practical.  The {'} is
>typographically ugly when preponderant.  Most software doesn't recognize
>it as a within-word character.  Omitting it altogether makes the text
>briefer and more pleasing to the eye.  I could go into more details, but
>won't bother.

I understand all of these except one.  Most software used in processing
language had better accept the apostrophe as being an acceptable
character in a word, since it is fairly common in English (probably more
common than 'z', 'q', or 'x').  You even used it in "won't" in the
paragraph above.

As far as I know, it is only in programming languages that apostrophe is
a special character.  We use 'h' instead of apostrophe in the YACC
grammar, therefore, since YACC takes a text file that meets C language
conventions.

A lot of the rest is just aesthetics.  >I< happen to like having a
language that looks unlike English - it helps remind me to avoid
malglico usages.  But that wasn't much a factor when we made the
decision - the goal was to have a consonantal sound that was not a
consonant for morphology purposes, and making it look different from a
regular alphabetic character seemed like an excellent way to go about
it.

But we've been over this many times. %^)

I don't like having to exclude And's texts - I just processed 3 years
worth of archives into a new set of lujvo for processing into the
dictionary.  But all my means of recognizing Lojban words pretty much
require that I shrink down the words to process by eliminating those
with non-Lojban letters like 'h', and to expect certain patterns of
consonant and vowel.  In only a couple of cases did I see a word that
was clearly an And Rosta Lojban word and manually "saved it" from
oblivion by putting the apostrophe back in.

lojbab