Re: [lojban] la .alis.

[Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com>]

I am going to weigh in (still as a newbie) but I actually think the issue of typographic conventions is a pretty important one.  (I'm also trying, not so subtly, to get the conversation back toward a discussion of what changes, if any, might be worthwhile, instead of debating the meanings of orthographies and typographies and the like.)  I will fully admit (with some chagrin now, but I was busy at the time) that when I first started looked at Lojban, I was excited as all get-out... And then saw a text, thought, "How can people using a 'logical' language have decided that things like punctuation are illogical?" and decided it wasn't worth my time.

I'm back now, because I have more time, and because I decided that Lojban, regardless of any (apparent) flaws, is worth it.  I still have issues with the typography, though, and I think that the lack of things like capitalization and punctuation is going to turn off new learners like myself (a trained linguist, who is very used to looking at texts in other languages), and perhaps others as well.

Consider, for example, the PDF version of la .alis.  In addition to everything else that is going on, there is no use of the periods to mark glottal stops, so .i becomes just i.  If you are like me, and would like to look at this side-by-side with the English version, this makes it extremely difficult to match up the sentences, as was mentioned by someone previously.  I realize this might not be an issue for people who have more experience with the language, but for people who want to use the translation as a means of studying and learning the language, this is a big impediment.

In following this conversation, I've become somewhat partial (solely in my own head, of course) to capitalizing only the first word of a sentence (the word after .i, and probably other delimiting things like no'i), and nothing else.  Thus:

lu" no’i La alis co’a tatpi le nu zutse le rirxe korbi re’o le mensi gi’e zukte fi noda i Abuboi so’uroi sutra zgana le cukta poi le mensi cu tcidu i Ku’i cy vasru no pixra ja nuncasnu i Lu ji’a ma prali sei la alis pensi fi lo cukta poi vasru no pixra ja nuncasnu li'u "li’u

This would provide the sorts of things that folks who use Latin alphabets expect: namely, something that delineates two sentences from each other (. in the case of most scripts, .i in the case of Lojban), followed by a capital letter.  For me, this makes it far easier to skim a text, as I can look for the two things that one normally looks for.  Granted, this would probably mean NOT capitalizing other things, like names, but I don't think that doing so would be the best idea anyway.

Chris

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