On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 21:11, Michael Everson
<michael.everson@gmail.com> wrote:
And yet there is no particular utility in this convention. It just looks LIKE SHOUTING. Spanish, one of the source languges for Lojban vocabulary, uses the acute accent to mark anomalous stress. If one does that, then one may be free to use capitalization in the conventional way it is used in other Latin-script languages. This enhances the readability of a text to anyone used to the convention (as most of us have been since we were four or five years of age).
Using only characters that are in the ASCII character set was a design goal of the standard Lojban orthography, and an acute accent mark does not fit with that design goal. (Lojban was designed by Americans :-).
As for the rest of the punctuation, I would say that while standard Lojban has some conventions that are quite unusual in comparison to most languages that use the Latin alphabet, once you have gotten used to them (and everyone who has studied the language a bit has gotten used to them), then using more typical Latin-script conventions with Lojban text looks just as strange as standard Lojban looks to someone like you who isn't used to it.
--
Adam Mesha (Raizen) <
adam.raizen@gmail.com>
Timendi causa est nescire.