Re: [lojban] la .alis.

[Michael Everson <michael.everson@gmail.com>]

This is an omnibus reply; note who wrote what.

On 28 Mar 2010, at 15:14, Jorge Llambías wrote:

> The sentence separator ".i" is visually quite distinct though. It may be that I'm just too used to Lojban by now, but I find caps at the start of Lojban sentences more distracting than helpful. Would you have the ".i" capitalized, or the first letter of the following word?

Well, then you're going to get a very large number of paragraphs or sentences beginning ".i Lu" and I don't really see how that's better than "I lu". 

Part of the goal is to use a typography that Carroll would have found familiar. It's treating Lojban just like any other Latin-script language, not as some sort of thing the Binars use to communicate with. (STTNG episode 16 "11001001".) To the unfocused eye, Lojban is no different from Basque in its non-Indo-Europeanism. ;-)

> Personally, I like to reserve capital letters for letter names, so "A" instead of "abu", "B" instead of "by", and so on, just like "1" can stand for "pa", "2" for "re" and so on. It would be interesting to see how the Alice text looks with that convention, given the use of letter names as pronouns,

Well, the letters have names; I would assume that By, Ly, Fy, Sy, Ny would do as well as Ogham's Beith, Luis, Fearn, Sail, Nion.

On 28 Mar 2010, at 21:01, Robin Lee Powell wrote:

> No-one's actually going to *stop* you doing as you like with the "la .alis." text.  Well, xorxes could, but I think he already public-domained it?

Aye.

> Anyways, we're not going to sue you or anything like that.  I doubt that we'd even get as far as the LLG publically denouncing it (although it's not outside the realm of possibility if the chosen orthography is particularly un-Lojbanic).

If you ran it through a filter to lowercase everything and strip out the punctuation it would be indistinguishable from the Alice PDF on your site.

> My own significant crankiness about the whole idea aside, I appreciate that you've come back to the community to discuss it; I wasn't expecting that after the IRC interaction.

Oddly, I did not have such a bad feeling about that interaction. I regret that you did.

On 28 Mar 2010, at 22:13, Robin Lee Powell wrote:

> A lot of people in the community (myself included obviously) are really, *really* averse to any changes that are specifically brought in from natural languages, *especially* English.

Standard Latin-script conventions are not English, though English shares them.


On 28 Mar 2010, at 22:17, Robin Lee Powell wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 04:06:11PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
>> 
>> Dude.  You never heard of "All publicity is good publicity"? 
> 
> More relevantly to the matter at hand, see my previous post; I really really don't want to have to deal with a crop of newbies using some slaughtered Latin orthography because they have a book to point at so they can tell me I'm wrong and it's OK.

Non-standard orthography or not, I expect that the Victorian typographic conventions will be careful and well-thought out. Not "slaughtered" or careless. But I am at pains to point out that it looks like the discussion of this sort of thing goes back at least 18 years. 

>> I don't see you decrying "la .alis." because of the xorxes-anity of the text.
> 
> Going through it *specifically* for that purpose has been on my to-do list since it was published.  The main reason I haven't done it yet is that the BPFK needs to finish before I will even *know* what in xorban and what isn't.

I ask again: is this a show-stopper? Is the language in this book Not Ready For Publication? 


On 28 Mar 2010, at 22:24, Robin Lee Powell wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 09:05:01PM +0100, Michael Everson wrote:
>> I am sure that my foreword would begin "This book does not use standard Lojban orthography."
> 
> If that was expanded into a paragraph, with an appropriate level of "If you use this sort of orthography, people will yell at you" sort of warning, the whole thing would bother me slightly less.

That would be the first sentence of a paragraph about the orthography and typography, yes. The reader would be warned that such conventions are not at present the norm amongst users of the language, etc.


On 28 Mar 2010, at 23:44, Jonathan Jones wrote:

>> Fair enough. Does that mean you wouldn't buy such a book if it were in Tengwar?
>  
> That depends. Is it using Lojban's conventions or the conventions of English? If it's using Lojban conventions, yes. If it's using the same "seriously non-Lojban-standard typographic conventions" as it would were it using the Latin script, then no.

Well, Tengwar is caseless so there's no argument.

My intention is to use standard Latin-script typographic conventions, and these differ in some particulars from those used standardly by Lojban.

> You want to use Gothic letters and what-not, fine. You want to use special fonts, fine. Just don't mess with the standard Lojban typographic conventions and we've got no problems.

Except that the book is then a whole mess of lower-case letters with no punctuation. 

> (What do you call a drop-cap that isn't a capital letter?)

A drop-cap.


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