Re: [lojban] la .alis.

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

On 30 Mar 2010, at 10:02, Arnt Richard Johansen wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 09:24:52AM +0100, Michael Everson wrote:
> 
>> What I can't do is anticipate the reaction of the community at large to an edition of a book which treats Lojban like a real language rather than an oddball.
> 
> It is of course very good that you are trying to treat Lojban as a real language. But if treating it as a real language is your goal, why not respect the conventions of casing and punctuation that has been adhered to in all serious writing for the past couple of decades?

Your conventions *already* allow for variation. Exclamation marks and question marks are optional. The dot is optional. The option of choosing between capitalization or the acute accent for stress is already there.  

Did you read what John Cowan said?

>> We have all sorts of orthographies for Lojban by now, from Cyrillic to Tengwar, and nobody says that they are "not Lojban".  I think I understand why some people don't like a traditional-Latin orthography: it's an instance of "the uncanny valley", just enough like what you're used to to be upsetting.  But the very fact that the two orthographies are isomorphic shows that the essential Lojbanity of the text is preserved.

I think his comment is quite reasonable.

> I don't understand what you are trying to accomplish by discussing this, since you have evidently decided to ignore what we say anyway.


Some people have said "Don't do it! Change nothing!"
Some people have said "Do it, but I'm sure I won't like it."
Some people have said "Please do it; this sounds interesting."

I seem to have been listening to all three kinds of comments. 

I've decided that I don't want to publish the book, in my series of Alice books, without capitalization or punctuation. I've decided that I want to apply funky old-fashioned Victorian typographic standards. I think that it will make the text more legible to anyone who has never seen the language before. My market is Carrollian collectors as much as it is people who can read the text. I am confident that comparison of the English text and the Lojban text will be much easier for the reader if "normal" typographic conventions are used. 

Michael

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