On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Michael Everson
<michael.everson@gmail.com> wrote:
On 29 Mar 2010, at 17:27, Leo Molas wrote:
>>> In my view, just pouring a whole mess of lower-case letters with no punctuation into my Alice template would not result in "fine Latin typography".
>>
>> Neither do I. I, unlike you, consider that a good thing. I don't
>> /want/ Lojban written with "fine Latin typography".
>
> I think this is a good point in all of this. Lojban is not written in Latin typography;
Standard Lojban orthography makes use of the Latin script.
The Latin script is possessed of a long tradition of typographic conventions.
These two things are distinct. You cannot say that a language is "written in a typography". That makes no sense.
Alright. "Lojban is not written [using] Latin typography."
> Lojban has a typogrphy that uses Latin a part of its alphabet and a part of its punctuation, using it in another way. Lojban uses this alphabet, to be compatible with everyone's keyboard; not with Latin typography.
With all due respect, capital letters and punctuation like , . ; : ' " « » ( ) [ ] { } are available with everybody's keyboard.
Loglan was devised in 1955 when there were only typewriters (unless you could afford a Pegasus or something), and modulo « » on French typewriters all of those characters were available then, too.
Actually, I believe that the Latin orthography was chosen because of the large number of cultures that could read it. As you've pointed out yourself, quite a large number of languages use some version of Latin script for writing their language.