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Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Question
Yes, the apostrophe is a letter in that it has a sound, namely the sound that an h would make. It only appears in very specific locations: between vowels. Due to its limited function, you can consider it like a second-class letter.
As for selma'o names (selma'o means "grammatical class of a cmavo" and cmavo means "little word denoting structure") there is a convention that takes the most important or otherwise remarkable cmavo of that class and capitalizes it to form the selma'o name.
Take for instance the class of cmavo that behave identically to {ui} (again, the curly braces here are used to quote lojban text, because using quotation marks might be mistaken for apostrophes, which as we are discussing, are also like letters). All the words that behave like {ui} are said to be in the class UI written in all caps.
Now, what happens when the most remarkable cmavo contains an apostrophe? Well, there's the obvious solution of simply not capitalizing the apostrophe at all, but when the lojban parser was originally written, certain things in the code needed to be written in all caps and in the code it was not allowed to use apostrophes, so the lower-case h was chosen, because a lower-case letter among upper-case letters is somewhat like a second-class letter, which reflects the true nature of the apostrophe anyway.
All that being said, the letter h proper only ever appears in selma'o names, which never actually appear in Lojban text (discussing selma'o *in* lojban is done by other methods). Equally, the letter h can appear when writing in all caps, but there is again no real purpose to that.
Well, to be honest, as selpa'i said, capital letters are used to designate stress, which can only be irregular in cmevla. For instance, in French, the word "Paris" is stressed on the last syllable, whereas in Lojban, standard stress is on the second-to-last syllable. To account for irregular stress in these borrowed names, Lojban lets you indicate where the irregular stress is by a multitude of methods. It used to be preferred to use capital letters for this, giving {.paRIS.}, but these days using diacritics such as accent marks is more advisable, giving {.parìs.}. If you have to borrow a name that has the h sound in an irregularly stressed syllable, then you could capitalize it according to the old way (remember, nowadays using accent marks is better). That would produce something like {.pahArosin.}, but that is pretty unusual.
So in sum, capital letters have an *extremely* limited use in Lojban. In fact, there're essentially no more reasons to ever use capital letters when actually writing *in* lojban. When talking *about* lojban, it can be useful to talk about grammatical classes of those little words, in which case it's unavoidable to write things like KOhA to refer to the entire class of small grammar words that behave identically to the major element {ko'a}. Historically, remember that using the all-caps for that purpose arose out of a convention based on the old source code for the parser. Finally, the apostrophe is indeed a letter, because is it indeed pronounced, but it has a limited function as a vowel separator: it can only appear between vowels (words can't start with it, for example).
.i mi'e la tsani mu'o
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