| In a message dated 7/8/2001 4:32:56 AM Central Daylight Time,
nicholas@uci.edu writes: To me, the preface is not part of the paedagogy of the lessons; there's As the first bit of Lojban the student sees, it ought to be a pure specimen. A questionable premise, I suppose. If the students notice -- and they may not, they may well wonder what the critters are when they come to the section that assures them that they are not punctuation (yes, it only says punctuation is not needed, not that it is forbidden -- but it gives no hints about how it might be used, and, indeed, there aren't any general conventions). If they are linguistically more sophisticated, they may go off like pi,er into clicks and glottal stops (curiously not mentioned in the phonology). On the other hand, I share everyone so far's horror of endless unbroken lines of lower case text, broken only by an occasional period and a slather of apostrohes. And I am constantly getting bogged down in the involutions of some people's clausal structures, for which the odd comma (or superfluous {kei} even) would be an enormous help. The complaint about the intro was just that of presentation and conflict with what was about to be said, not with the notion of punctuation per se. Maybe, when all these clauses get introduced, a few words about the civility of writing and the use of punctuation to aid that could be made to legitimate the whole thing? |