Re: [lojban] My opinion on Lojban typography variants, and the la .alis. sample page

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

On 30 Mar 2010, at 15:29, Kevin Reid wrote:

> Before anything else, I would like to say that I admire your patience and your goal to balance typographical aesthetics and the wishes of the Lojban community.

Thank you, Kevin.

> I notice that your “normal” (left side) Lojban text lacks any “.” whatsoever. One of your objections seems to be the absence of non-letter-based cues to beginnings and ends of sentences; how about inserting the “.” before “i”?

I think if the text is undotted, then it is undotted (which is why the full stop is available for its traditional use).

> One could debate whether doing just this is worse than fully-dotted or fully-undotted Lojban text, and whether it would mislead beginners into thinking that “.” has something to do with sentence separation, but it at least has the advantage of being “not wrong” and increasing the visibility of sentence separators. I, for one, am used to reading “.i” as being the sentence separator. In fact, considering that a real speaker will pause between sentences, arguably even “... cu tcidu. i ku'i cy ...” is not wrong as a representation.

I appreciate that argument!

> I think it should be at least tried to have the Lojban text fully dotted (“.i”, “cy.”, “.alis.”, etc.); even if they do not fall on sentence separations, they add visual structure and might reduce the “wall of text” appearance of your left-side page.

Well, fine, but such a text is not available.

> I note that you have placed capitalization-and-period for each plain “i”, and the “i ku'i”, but not the logically-connected “i ca bo” (line 4 of paragraph 2) or “i je nai ji'a” (line 1 of paragraph 3). I find this to be inconsistent; if you're going to be strict about Latin conventions between unconnected sentences, you should use semicolons between these connected sentences.

No, that was a error in not parsing "icabo" and "ijenaiji'a". 

> My opinion on the matter in general:
> 
> I see three major categories of possible differences:
> 
>  1. Those which represent Lojban structure differently. For example,
>     writing áéíóú instead of AEIOU for syllable stress.

Correct.

> 2. Those which add redundant cues to the existing sentence structure.
>     For example, adding quotation marks and question marks, or
>     italicizing {ba'e}-marked words.

Correct.

>  3. Those which add information. For example, capitalizing some
>     sumti-selbri but not others, such as you have done with “lo Blabi
>     Ractu” vs. “le glare djedi”, or adding italics where there were no
>     emphasis markers in the text, such as in “le Ractu ca'a lebna lo
>     junla le kosta daski”.

The White Rabbit is the name of a speaking character in the book, whose name was distinguished by means of capitalization from an ordinary adjective-and-noun by Lewis Carroll. Even in French where capitalization of nouns is not as common as it is in English, he's called "le Lapin Blanc". 

> I do not mind the first (especially when they have aesthetic value such as, in my opinion, the use of accents instead of uppercase), am ambivalent about the second (especially as they are somewhat analogous to a speaker's use of tone), and object to the third (because I feel it will confuse the reader as to the actual structure and significant aspects of Lojban text).

In this case I was thinking that the front matter would make clear what capitalization is being used for, in the essay that discusses the differences between standard Lojban usage and the usage in the book. 

In case you want to compare the English and non-standard Lojban: 
http://www.evertype.com/books/alice-en-jbo-p-1.png

Michael

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