[lojban-beginners] Re: apostrophes?

[Andrew Archibald <archibal@math.mcgill.ca>]

On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 01:24:40PM +1300, Michael van der Gulik wrote:
> Why does Lojban use apostrophes instead of "h"'s? It seems much more 
> natural to use "h"'s, as it keeps words together (consider that an 
> apo'stro'phe ins'er'ts sp'ac'es i'n'to wo'rds, breaking them up and 
> making them harder to read as one word).

From the CLL, 
# The apostrophe represents a phoneme similar to a short, breathy
# English ``h'', (IPA [h]). The letter ``h'' is not used to represent
# this sound for two reasons: primarily in order to simplify
# explanations of the morphology, but also because the sound is very
# common, and the apostrophe is a visually lightweight representation of
# it. The apostrophe sound is a consonant in nature, but is not treated
# as either a consonant or a vowel for purposes of Lojban morphology
# (word-formation), which is explained in Chapter 4. In addition, the
# apostrophe visually parallels the comma and the period, which are also
# used (in different ways) to separate syllables.

http://www.lojban.org/en/publications/reference_grammar/chapter3.html

Put more briefly, the apostrophe doesn't behave like other consonants,
so writing it like them would be weird; if it visually splits up
words, good, because it splits up sounds (although less so than a
period).  If you're worried about "reading as one word", I think
you're in for trouble: 

miklamalezarci .idocadzulebisli

is perfectly valid unambiguous lojban.  It's not usual to write it
this way, but certain other gluings are more common (e.g. {pukiku}). 
(If this seems dreadful, well, it's the way you speak English, and
it's the way you speak lojban, and because of the audiovisual
isomorphism, it's okay to write lojban that way too). 

> Is it acceptable to use, e.g. "keha" instead of "ke'a"? Or will people 
> become angry?

I think your question has been asnwered already, but think of it as
writing your (english) emails all in lower case, or using apostrophes
to construct plurals.  People will figure it out, if they work at it;
you may look like a semiliterate or an avant-garde poet.

I suggest getting very used to standard lojban before innovating.*
(And if you want to argue about innovations, that's not what this list
is for.)

Andrew

* Note official policy is that discussions of language improvements,
when the language is unfrozen, are to be conducted in lojban.