Re: Aesthetics

[Nick Nicholas <opoudjis@optushome.com.au>]

   Date: Fri, 06 Dec 2002 15:34:27 +0000
   From: "Jorge Llambias" <jjllambias@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Aesthetics

cu'u la xorxes
> la nitcion cusku di'e
>
> > And I regard the refusal to include graphic representations of
> > punctuation (the dotless style) as callousness to me the reader.
>
> The dots are not punctuation in Lojban, they are word-internal.
>
> If they only appeared in {.i} it could be argued that they
> were punctuation, and there they do provide some help to discern
> the structure of phrases, but in other places I find them more
> disruptive than helpful.

I will come clean: it's the omission of the sentential dot in {i} that 
I find callous. The rest, well, I omitted a dot in the title of the 
Lojban brochure myself (yes, yes, it's back in now), and we all know 
what cmene are when we see them, even if space delimited.

> > Yes, I
> > can work out Lojban written without dots. But why is your lojban so
> > cool as to merit the extra headache?
> Once you accept that it makes no difference, you don't even
> notice which style you're reading and the headaches go away.
> Something like the x- and h-surrogate alphabets for Esperanto.
> Some people like to spend a lot of time arguing about it, but
> most people don't even notice which system they are reading
> unless they pay special attention to the matter.

I dunno. I mean, I've corresponded with my co-translator in ASCII Greek 
for 7 years, and neither of us will change their transliteration (and 
they're quite differently structured). And I admit that punctuation is 
a very culture specific thing (I was talking about that with a friend 
today, actually; the whole system of punctuation as we know it in 
English really is a late Western invention, and most scripts barely 
have the equivalent of a period/full stop.)

And yet, please give me something more to delimit sentences with than 
{i}. Give me the dot there, and do with the rest what you will.

Or don't.

--
  Dr Nick Nicholas,        nickn@unimelb.edu.au     French/Italian,
  http://www.opoudjis.net                   University of Melbourne
  "There is a danger, my dear Neophron, that they will go further, and
   conceive a contempt for the stress-accent as something very trivial,
   and will decree that any group of words of any kind is a verse."
  --- Maximos Planudes, predicting free verse and worse, late xiii AD.