Re: [lojban] la .alis.

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

On 30 Mar 2010, at 15:46, Jonathan Jones wrote:

> No they aren't.

Essentially, they are; to the spell-checker, they are. One is missing a markup apparatus (which makes it hard to read), but plenty of languages including European languages have manuscripts that just run things on without punctuation. The ambiguity gave rise to the punctuation and casing conventions which users of those languages enjoy today.

> The second has no indication of sentence separation, incidental clauses, or a great many other things that written English uses punctuation to express. Your argument doesn't hold for the simple reason that Englishneeds punctuation in it's writing to make sense. Lojban doesn't. It's "punctuation" is words, such as {.i}, {xu}, {mo}, {.ui}, and etc.

This still does not mean that a markup apparatus is unhelpful for a language like Lojban. Chinese and Irish have interrogative particles, and yet they use the question mark. Yes, Lojban is special and interesting because of its particles, but that doesn't mean that a totally minimalist typography for it is inherently "superior" to a more familiar typography with markup apparatus.

In my opinion.

Michael

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