[lojban] 3 ways of writing lojban was: proposed grammar definition for ZOhOI

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Wednesday 26 January 2011 22:47:21 Ross Ogilvie wrote:
> The problem is if you want to allow a decimal point (or other
> shorthands overloading the meaning of a symbol) then you will need to
> put it in the parsing rules to figure out whether a dot is a decimal
> point (only allowed in a string of PA for example) or a pause.

Worse than that: "1963-12-18" could be read as "pasoxaci pi'e pare pi'e pabi" 
or "pasoxaci vu'u pare vu'u pabi", depending on context.

On Wednesday 26 January 2011 20:18:02 Alex Rozenshteyn wrote:
> pe'i there should be 3 ways of writing lojban:
>    3. Visual shorthand: It will develop anyway, so it's best to standardize
>    it.  e.g. {xu} can be *replaced* by a question mark, {to} and {to'o}
> might be *replaced* by left and right parentheses, etc.  It would make
> sense to speak of {xubu}, the grapheme representing the cmavo {xu}

"xu" should not be replaced by a question mark, any more than Russian "ли" is. 
And the question mark should be at the end of the sentence, not next to the 
question word, unless you use an Armenian question mark.

I also think that mode 3 should support abbreviations and symbols. Since some 
of them (such as "ku", which is equivalent to "kDa" as a unit symbol) look 
like Lojban words, I propose this rule: If a word contains the character ՟, 
which was used in Armenian for the purpose, it's an abbreviation, and it has 
to be expanded before being passed to the parser. The expansion is 
context-dependent; e.g. "mi benji lo Mg՟ 2 Mg՟" expands to "mi benji lo 
megygra be li re lidgusyjinme".

Pierre
-- 
The Black Garden on the Mountain is not on the Black Mountain.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.