Re: [lojban] optional punctuation

[Pierre Abbat <phma@oltronics.net>]

On Sun, 08 Jul 2001, Nick Nicholas wrote:
>You will have noticed that the Lojban-language preface of the lessons uses
>optional punctuation, including ! and ; . I myself think optional
>punctuation is a good and wondrous thing, because I find slabs of lowercase
>Lojban with no punctuation and capitalisation indigestible. (I am very much
>aware that punctuation and capitalisation are Western-only conventions;
>then again, so is learning to read Latin script.)

I too find it hard to digest, but the punctuation as used in the preface is
strange. I see no reason to put a punctuation mark (other than a denpa bu) at
the beginning of a word, unless the word is closing a quotation, and "!la'a"
makes no sense to me. It makes me think that there's supposed to be a click
there, like Khoisan.

If I were writing Lojban with punctuation, I'd put the question mark at the end
of the clause, and similarly the exclamation mark. Quotation marks I would use
like this:
.i le seltcidu po'u la'e lu" la lojban. mo? "li'u
la'o gy" Robin Turner "gy
I would use commas about as in English, though maybe not in lists because
Lojban requires the "and" to be repeated, and if I were dropping the periods at
the ends of names I'd make sure not to drop the period before a comma,
otherwise someone could run the name together with the following word.

phma