[lojban-beginners] Re: Hello there!

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2005 at 05:02:21PM -0500, Peter TB Brett wrote:
> 
> coi.
> 
> la .adam. fo le samymri cu cusku fe di'e:
> 
> > {la'o gy. Adam COOPER .gy fo le samxa'a cu cusku fe di'e}
> 
> Am I correct in believing that {gy} acts as a kind of quotation
> mark or escape from normal Lojban?  

Not really.  la'o means "the next word that follows acts as a
delimiter for a string of non-Lojban text".  Many people use gy for
English text, because gy is the Lojban word for the letter g, which
the Lojban word for English starts with.  I myself use zoi instead,
zoi being one of the two words (along with la'o) that acts like
this.

> If so, is there any particular reason a punctuation mark isn't
> used?

Because all things in Lojban must be both speakable and writable
without ambiguity, hence whatever punctuation mark you pick must
have an associated sound.  Sooner or later someone will want to
quote either the punctuation mark or the sound it makes, and then
they can't use that punctuation mark to close it.  The solution to
this problem, which only gets worse as you think about it, is to let
people pick a delimiter that doesn't occur in what they then say.

-Robin

-- 
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