Re: [lojban] la .alis.

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Sunday 28 March 2010 11:22:46 And Rosta wrote:
> I'm interested too, and in the general question of how to reconcile the
> highly evolved traditions of roman typography with Lojban. But it's
> probably realistic to recognize that most Lojbanists have no interest in
> such reconciliation, and would wish for the typography to be wholly
> subjugated to prevailing Lojban conventions.

The traditions of Roman typography evolved with the languages written in it, 
most of which, as they evolved, were Indo-European. I've read in a book about 
Turkish, which is a relative newcomer to the alphabet and has its own 
convention (shared with a few related languages) about dots on "i", that the 
use of the comma in Turkish can be confusing to a native English speaker.

Lojban is quite different from other languages written in the Latin alphabet. 
None of them that I know uses spoken quotation marks (though the ending 
quotation mark is spoken "iti" in Sanskrit) or sentence separators. I don't 
see a problem with writing a punctuation mark for a quotation, but it's not 
obvious which side of the word "lu" or the delimiter it should go on.

I see no problem with punctuation marks in Lojban, though some particular 
marks pose difficulties:
*The comma may be written at the end of a word to signal a pause in thought, 
or several elided terminators in a row, but if it follows a cmevla or 
precedes a word beginning with a vowel, the period must be written too. 
That's because the comma, inside a word, indicates a syllable break with no 
pause, so "la litc, e la alkuist" is equivalent to "la litce la .alkuist".
*The period is commonly written both before and after words to indicate 
pauses, and between words with no spaces to indicate semantically joined 
words that have to have a pause, such as "na.e" and "kot.divuár". If we're 
going to use abbreviations, then (and some unit symbols, such as "ku" (=kDa), 
are identical to words), we have to use something other than a period to mark 
them. I've suggested the hyphen, but I'm not sure that's the right choice.

The question mark and exclamation mark, I think, should come at the end of the 
sentence, not next to the question word. The only other language I know of 
which punctuates the question word is Armenian.

On Sunday 28 March 2010 14:25:28 Adam Mesha (Raizen) wrote:
> 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 :-).

The orthography was designed the year before the first draft proposal of 
Unicode was published. As Unicode is now widely available on computers, I 
think that that design goal should be dropped. I think that the accent mark, 
for indicating stress, looks better than a capital letter.

If I were capitalizing sentences, I'd capitalize the word after ".i", not 
the ".i" itself. The word after ".i" can begin with any letter except "'" 
(which doesn't have a capital form). This is like Afrikaans, in which 
sentences often begin with "'n" (the indefinite article), and the word 
after "'n", rather than "'n" itself, is capitalized.

Pierre
-- 
li fi'u vu'u fi'u fi'u du li pa

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