[lojban] Re: la .alis.

[Evertype <michael.everson@gmail.com>]

Robin said:

He "offered" to publish it for us.

I suggested that I might publish it, yes.

He then insisted on changing the layout and punctuation to match
English, and refused to publish it any other way.

Layout? The layout is in paragraphs, which match one-to-one with
Carroll's paragraphs. In terms of fonts, yes, I would use Liberty and
De Vinne and Mona Lisa Recut and the Engraver's fonts.

English? No, the suggestion was not to "match English", but to take
advantage of some conventions which have been common to all Latin-
script languages for centuries.

Refused? You've already got a 69-page monofont text (looks like TeX to
me) PDF available, and electronic formats which your computers can
parse. What value would there be in me putting out a similar edition
-- especially in the context of a range of translations of Alice?

Currently published are Cornish, English, Esperanto, German, and
Irish.

In the works are French, Italian, Manx, Scots, Shaw Alphabet, Swedish,
Ulster Scots, and Welsh.

Possibilities are at least Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, Lojban, and
Scottish Gaelic.

That is, he wanted it to look like this:

Mi klama la Bast,n. I la Bab cusku "lu mi klama li'u"

Not quite. But I'd be very interested to talk with people about the
various options one might have for punctuation markup.

Caps at start of sentences, quote marks, a few other things I can't
remember.

Caps for proper names (la Alis), and anomalous stress marked by acute
accents rather than by capitalization (which is thereby freed for
other use). Near as I can tell the only word in the text affected by
this is "la meri,An" ("la Meri,Án" or "la Meri,án"; the original is
"Mary Ann").

We (people on IRC at the time), umm, kinda told him where to stick
that idea. In pretty clear terms.

My memory of the IRC was not so black and white. You, and some others,
expressed a lack of interest in an edition with "Victorian"
typography, and criticized the notion of doing so. But everyone did
not share that view. Pages like http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban+typography
and http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Punctuation suggest that there is no
blanket ban on punctuation, for instance.

I don't think he likes us anymore.

I like you fine. I just disagree with your stance on punctuation and
typographic conventions.

I also like Lewis Carroll, and good typography. I find long paragraphs
with no clear visual indication of sentence boundaries to be
bewildering. I am sure that computers and savants find it quite simple
to parse. I as a multilingual trained linguist expert in writing
systems, I still find it much easier to navigate the language when
standard Latin-script conventions are used.

My English and Cornish editions are used in Cornwall by learners who
find it helpful to compare the two texts. Thing which helps learners
to navigate a paragraph are sentence boundaries, capitalized proper
names, question marks, and so on.

Indeed, in http://www.lojban.org/publications/reference_grammar/chapter3.html,
we find the following.

"Technically, the period is an optional reminder to the reader of a
mandatory pause that is dictated by the rules of the language; because
these rules are unambiguous, a missing period can be inferred from
otherwise correct text. Periods are included only as an aid to the
reader."

In for a penny, in for a pound. Full stops are not necessary; they are
redundant. So too are quotation marks, and since anomalous stress can
be more congenially marked with the acute accent (as in Spanish) than
by SHOUTING, there's no reason an edition of a text could not choose
to do that, and thereby permit capital letters to be used,
redundantly, to mark the beginnings of sentences, proper names, and
whatnot.

You, Robin, and maybe even many Lojbanists, might believe that such
redundancy is irrelevant, un-useful, wrong-headed, ugly, stupid, or
just plain "wrong". I rather doubt that all 464 members of this
discussion forum will hold such extreme views, though. Redundancy is
harmless -- indeed, we don't speak with punctuation marks in English
or Irish or any other languages. Lojban's "audio-visual isomorphism"
is extremely cool. But centuries of Latin typographic practice have
evolved because those practices are *useful* to readers (as useful as
the full stop) and I can see no reason not to pursue my project just
because you and a few others on IRC, "umm, kinda told me where to
stick" the idea.

I would appreciate it if anyone who *is* interested in this would say
so, as I'd like to discuss the options regarding redundant markup of
quoted material.

Best regards,
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/

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