On 11/1/06, Alex Martini <alexjm@umich.edu> wrote:
On Nov 1, 2006, at 5:11 AM, Andrii (lOkadin) Zvorygin wrote:
On 10/31/06, Alex Martini
<alexjm@umich.edu> wrote:
u'u Yes, the dotted/spaceless style has a reason for accents. If you can actually read and use it, I suppose it is technically correct.
ki'u I was describing the variants that people actually *use*, either in the corpus (the collection of published Lojban text) or in this mailing list. To date, I've never seen anyone use this style, except for special cases like {lonu} where they drop a non-stopping space between two cmavo.
I use it.
OK - there is one user. But unless you can make some pretty good arguments, it's still harder to read and non-standard.
pretty good argument is you are an English user, a stress-timed language, and lOjban is not a stress timed language, it has mandatory stress, unlike English.
The main issue with sticking majuscules (aka big letters or upper case) in the middle of text is that is messes with how we read. Fluent readers don't actually read letter by letter anymore, but by shape of the letter outlines. And all the vowels are normally shorter than a majuscule or an ascender (like h). So making them tall by capitalizing them means I can no longer read the text fluently, but have to slow down and look at individual letters like I did in elementary school again. Which is much slower.
are you a fluent lOjbanist?
Is thIs tExt EAsier tO rEAd? I thInk nOt, becAUse yOU cannOt rEAd It At A nOrmal pAce bUt hAve to slOw dOwn. (It Also lOOks prEtty Ugly.)
please read previous thread on penultimate syllables. English text does NOT emphasize the penultimate syllable. It is stress timed. so you have stress at regular intervals. There don't seem to be any defined rules as to where you should put emphasis in English, so it makes no sense to capitalize English.
Try it, write out some text in English in all lower case, normal mixed case, accented case, and all upper case. The normal mixed case is what you've trained your brain to read best after years of near constant practice. It doesn't take kindly to messing that up.
above statement. .e'o try to stay informed, check Wikipedia before you start capitalizing random vowels in English.
As for bandwidth/parsing advantages to the undotted style, I don't really see them. The first step (an early step? not sure of specifics) of parsing Lojban into structure *is* to find the word boundaries. So if you use undotted, the parser just puts the spaces back in anyhow. Check out either jbofi'e or the official DOS parser.
I've actually made my own parser.
[ li'o ]
Yes, but can it parse Lojban without finding word boundaries?
the point of a parser is to break a string apart into atoms. My parser can parse lOjban without spaces. The above question is contradiction by definition(of the word parse).