El 28/03/2010 09:19 a.m., Michael Everson escribió:
> 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/
>
Here comes my humble opinion about this...
You (everson) are going to try this odd version of written lojban. Not
one is going to set you in flames for this, though.
As you said, there are many alternatives for the actual alphabet, and
many discussions about orthography alternatives. However, the way we use
it commonly is the way you'll read it in the IRC or in the books. There
might be better ways to write lojban, and you may writing it better than
us, but the way we write it's the way we like to read it. (I re-wrote
that sentence to not be *that* tautological).
Of course, the way we write it might be modified for good, but that
should be done by the community, more specifically by the LLG (since
it's an ex-cathedra language and all that stuff).
You can, of course, publish your book the way you want. The problem will
be that that will not be written lojban. It could be another isomorphism
from some writings to lojban, but not what's known as written lojban.
For example, I could write a book in English, but I change all
characters 'a' with 'u', and all 'u' with '#' (saying it's because it's
more beautiful or readable). It would be a pain in the ass for all the
English speakers, and, assuming it's actually better, is not going to
really help anyone, since new speakers will be confused.
And about this last point, if anyone get who doesn't speak lojban, and
is interested, he or she will be confused when he start learning lojban.
I think this would be the worst part.
You claim that "centuries of Latin typographic practice have
evolved because those practices are *useful* to readers", well, that's
assuming that they actually evolved. It's not true until it's proved.
Take the natural languages, for example. They evolved for centuries, as
well as their written versions, but they have so many problems, that led
us to develop a language trying to prevent all this faults.
I'm interested in discussing the redundant markup, so as this channel
(the mailing list) is and ever be.
mu'o mi'e .leos.
--
My lojban journal: http://learninglojban.wordpress.com
My personal blog: http://leomolas.tumblr.com
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature