[lojban-beginners] Re: Spelling

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On 10/25/07, Penguino <spheniscine@gmail.com> wrote:
> How do you spell within a sentence? For example the English sentence, "Joe
> writes the letters "ABC"."

  la djos ciska lo lerfu no'u abu joi by joi cy
  Joe writes the letters A, B and C.

> If this translates to la djos. ciska lu .abu by.
> cy. li'u , wouldn't that mean that he literally wrote the words ".abu by.
> cy."?

Yes. Of course if you hear rather than read {la djos ciska lu pa re ci li'u}
you can't tell whether Joe wrote "pa re ci" or "123" or "1 2 3" or ...
Similarly,
for those of us that use capital letters to stand for the words abu,
by, cy, ...
the same way that the numerals 1, 2, 3, ... stand for the words pa, re ci, ...
then hearing {la djos ciska lu a bu by cy li'u} we can't really be sure what
were the exact symbols written (or if there were spaces, etc.) In any case,
we can be sure that whatever the symbols used, the content was the
lerfu-string consisting of those four (not three!) Lojban words.

mu'o mi'e xorxes