From suomichris@gmail.com Tue Jan 05 11:44:01 2010 Received: from mail-gx0-f210.google.com ([209.85.217.210]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1NSFJt-0001EU-W0 for lojban-list@lojban.org; Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:44:01 -0800 Received: by gxk2 with SMTP id 2so5713809gxk.4 for ; Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:43:51 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=domainkey-signature:mime-version:received:in-reply-to:references :from:date:message-id:subject:to:content-type; bh=bQ4cIaKKiEP3MpnLC5RL4zfbAzZdl/VqSjV5y6DOnS8=; b=L5tpGrbVml9CDl8h3P1vjEnVVCYrdX64pFc7pHugkDb3/ymLYPMMmCqvZlWXkhYRnU XBi+ALpKaU4oVr1jp3y1QqTzdSnmKU8WjzrdUYMlt67yjiZ3JkReeDQo8YqaMz42RhAE +7BVij34OfF9+5l4fU8xDHdxvLlnhlkqlhDjA= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=mime-version:in-reply-to:references:from:date:message-id:subject:to :content-type; b=F0CYRhFe9iAHIk7C9ykoimZPHtoMLez6kL7l483nsxpR39TCN0aC/f8J79EblqVyeR xOe4F9Qv3DnmHUyjYzzelL7gfz1QqvXPNXNiw9kN9BbGSr1bNptDn0vz1pZ2FxK7Ahd3 e2qFQiD7F9D+xRFQ7WML56c1NTtPqPIEseS7A= MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.101.98.13 with SMTP id a13mr7919756anm.88.1262720631166; Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:43:51 -0800 (PST) In-Reply-To: <27513e551001050303p37e2744bx6da04dac2a29ef6a@mail.gmail.com> References: <8CC5AA7171DCAE9-8FA8-1F578@webmail-d065.sysops.aol.com> <55b258c21001030921o36fa5cf6s2b1047ca0ddca20c@mail.gmail.com> <27513e551001050303p37e2744bx6da04dac2a29ef6a@mail.gmail.com> From: Christopher Doty Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 11:43:30 -0800 Message-ID: Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Initial impression To: lojban-list@lojban.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 03:03, Oren wrote: > Lojban looks really strange? Indeed indeed indeed... and I feel that goes > along nicely with 'being culturally neutral' But being strange and being culturally neutral are completely different things. A monolingual speaker of English can also look at a text in Japanese or Chinese (assuming it is written left-right) and get some sense of the structure from the punctuation. Likewise with, say, Arabic, assuming said speaker knows about the writing direction difference. But with Lojban, there simply isn't anything that lets you structure the text in this way, and the things that you think should structure the text (like periods and commas) are doing something totally different. You can be culturally neutral without making it extremely difficult to parse a text from sight... > P.S. Actually, I'm also really interested in alternative alphabets or > standardized fonts/ color-coding ideas, but I keep being drawn back to the > universality of ascii, since I don't really see a substantial objective > argument against it. I agree that something else would probably be best, although it does have the problem of not being as "universal," although in the era of Unicode and easily-modified keyboard layouts, I'm not sure that the universality of the Latin system should be a motivation to not try and develop something new.. Chris