Re: [lojban] la .alis.

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

On 30 Mar 2010, at 21:06, John E Clifford wrote:

> 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).

I would tend to use a semicolon rather than a Victorian colon since the modern reader has expectations of a difference between both. Carroll tends to use the colon more, but it's difficult for a modern editor to work out his reasons for preferring it to semicolon or full stop. 

But the distinction you note is quite reasonable. 

>     More or less consequent on that, the repeated capitalized 'I' is distracting at best, muddling at worst, so I would capitalize the next word.

This would inevitably lead the Latin-typograpically-savvy reader to link the "i" with the previous bridi rather than to consider it the beginning of a new bridi. And in the case of this book, would simply shift the "distraction" burden of "I lu" to "i Lu".

>     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).

Ah, you and Jorge differ here, since he suggested splitting them.

> 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?

In this text the only occurrence of comma is in the name "la meri,An". I wonder of "la Meri An" is sufficient, unless stress must be marked as "la Meri Án". 

>     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 was wondering if the middle dot (a dot at the height of the top dot of a colon) would not be a nice way of indicating that. In standard style (no casing): 

La Djan· nanmu ·ije la Djeimyz· ninmu.

Of course this suggests using middle dot as a full stop:

la djan. nanmu .ije la djeimyz. ninmu·

though that is a break from traditional punctuation. 

But the source text is undotted and it doesn't seem very feasible to dot it.

> 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.

Well, Georgian marks the ends of paragraphs with a right-pointing triangle of dots, thus ჻

> 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.

This does seem to be satisfactory, if the grammar allows it.

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