Message-Id: <199602162353.SAA06559@locke.ccil.org>
Date:         Fri, 16 Feb 1996 16:02:14 -0700
Reply-To: Chris Bogart <cbogart@QUETZAL.COM>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: Chris Bogart <cbogart@QUETZAL.COM>
Subject:      Accents for apostrophes?
To:         lojban@cuvmb.bitnet
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>The basic problem is that, in fixed-width founts at least, {'} contains
>a lot of white space and so tends to break things up.  Many languages
>use an apostrophe as a kind of word-separator so that this isn't such
>a problem -- and few languages use quite as many as Lojban.

Hmmm, I can see that, but I usually use a proportional font, so I'm used to=
=20
lojban words looking pretty coherent.

How about this: a graphical convention that says in a fixed-width font (or=
=20
any font, I guess) you can represent the apostrophe by a forward accent over=
=20
the second letter, or a backward one over the first letter, or something=20
like that.  For your example sentence,=20
        {.itu'e ro ma'arbi'i ba galtu} =20
we could write:=20
        {.itu=E9 ro ma=E1rbi=ED ba galtu}

Unfortunately that probably won't help much with usenet/email lojban, since=
=20
people don't always have the same accented letters available, and people who=
=20
do are more likely to have proportional fonts available anyway!


>I do find that the {'}s and {.i}s do make Lojban visually incoherent.

Usually the {.} appears at the beginning or end of a word, so it only=20
contributes to breaking the words apart.  So I have to disagree about {.i}. =
=20
I do agree in the case of words like "na.a" that have a period in the middle=
=20
of them.  But they're quite rare.