Re: [lojban] la .alis.

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

Now that the petty bickering has died down a little and it seems likely that a version of Alice in Lojban will appear, let me comment on the samples before us.

1.  Note please that '(,)i' does not mark the beginning of a new *sentence* but of a new *bridi*, which may or may not be the same thing.  In particular, ijeks mark not new sentences but new clauses of a compound or complex sentence.  So they should have neither a punctuation period before them not a capital letter.  Whether they should have a comma or a semi or full colon, I am less sure -- Victorian conventions were  very different from modern ones, for example (and British from American throughout).  
     More or less consequent on that, the repeated capitalized 'I' is distracting at best, muddling at worst, so I would capitalize the next word.
     But I would run the ijeks and similar items as single words, in keeping with their unitary function in the grammar (and no following capital).
2. Unless things have changed a lot, the occurrence of ',' is almost always predictable.  The use in texts was originally an aid to learning, to remind people to take a breath (or break).  Somehow, it stuck and is now being touted as "standard orthography".  Are the only pictures allowed in Lojban books to be those of Dick,  Jane, Spot, and Fluffy?
     But there are some places where a pause is not so obvious, mainly IIRC at the ends of names.  To be sure, if the name is capitalized, then this is 
     predictable  as well, even if the name is a purely Lojban phrase.  In short, a dotless text would be quite adequate and much nicer looking.
        I think punctuation periods are a bad idea, even when they would mark the eventual end of a long complex or compound sentence, but in that place I 
     would not mind them much, just not after every sentence ('i', which is much bigger than '.', is quite adequate.
3.  As for capitalizing words that are not cmene but Lojban phrases, the easiest generally satisfactory way would seem to be to convert all the 'lo's (but surely they all should have been 'le's) to 'la's.



      

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