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Re: [lojban] la .alis.
But the other initials give me pause. Why on Earth is “Blabi” and “Ractu”
capitalised? Is it because he is a person, and all references to persons
are capitalised in this story?
Yes. He is the White Rabbit and that's what Carroll did.
<snipping a few lines here>
Setting words in italics when they are preceded by the emphasis marker
“ba'e” is fine, but when they appear on their own it looks illiterate. (I
presume you are merely copying the italics from some English master, and
the emphasis somehow got lost in the English-to-Lojban translation.)
"Very" is italicized twice by Carroll. I don't know what "when they appear
on their own it looks illiterate" means. When words appear in italics on
their own it looks "illiterate"?
I think my problems with both of these come done to the same thing: they break
the audiovisual isomorphism. That is, if I were to treat everything but
alphanumerics (and apostrophes, commas, periods, etc) as whitespace, I could
completely ignore the guillemots, parentheses, etc, and come to exactly the
same text. They're just very fancy forms of whitespace. Sentence initial
caps, and capitalizing proper names adds nothing interesting (though I'll
point out here that I still *HATE* it, personally).
But capitalizing {Ractu} and {Blabi}, and italicizing words that are unmarked
in the text, is adding information. It's as though there's something
contained only in the markup, that would be lost if the book were read aloud.
That's just utterly wrong. One of the big principles of Lojban is exactly
that audiovisual isomorphism. That's *why* we speak all the punctuation.
I can definitely accept the argument that the italics are representing
something that should have been preserved, and that the translation is faulty
for omitting it. If the text were {i ku'i ca le nu le ractu ca'a fu'e .ue
lebna lo junla le kosta daski fu'o gi'e li'o}, then the italics wouldn't seem
out of place.
Comments that apply to both versions:
The apostrophes in the chapter heading look floating and disconnected because of the large distance between the cap height and the x-height.
Yeah, that's the font. Weird, but that's not my doing.
Maybe pick a different font?
I disagree with Jorge's insistence on straight apostrophes instead of curly
apostrophes. Straight apostrophes are an artifact of the conflation of
apostrophes/foot signs in typewriters, and does not need to used when
alternatives are available.
Indeed; this is a matter of taste. The source PDF has curly apostrophes, and
it's in standard Lojban orthography.
Strongly agree that that's just a matter of taste. My own taste runs to
straight, but of all of this, that's the thing I care about *least*.
Since I haven't voiced my overall opinion yet, I find that I don't overall
mind the addition of the guillemets, parentheses, punctuation, etc.
I would also strongly prefer a version with dots applied in the normal places
(again, I understand they weren't in what you were working from), and for that
same reason hate the new dots to end "sentences". I do like acute accents
instead of caps for stress marking.
If you absolutely *must* capitalize the beginning of sentences (and again, I
really wish you would accept that { .i } is at least as noticeable a sentence
separator as ". [any capital letter" is in English), I think I do fall into
the camp that views {.i} as a separator, instead of being part of either
bridi, so capitalizing the next word after it (again, assuming it's not part
of the joiner, as xorxes points out) would probably be slightly better.
--
Adam Lopresto
http://cec.wustl.edu/~adam/
Unlike fine wine and cheese, tuna noodle casserole does *not* improve
with age.
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