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Re: [lojban] footnotes, etc?

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 21:35, John E. Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
Point?  You don't use footnotes in spoken anything.  In written anything, you use the standard footnote conventions.  Loglan long ago (1960) had an array of typesetting cmavo which were soon discarded as totally irrelevant;why bring them back?

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So if I'm understanding John correctly here, I can write a book in (or translate a book into) lojban, use little asterisks or superscript numbers, and have the matching ones at the bottom of the page, and it would still be considered good, grammatical lojban?

At first this is surprising, but when I try to think up my objections, they seem to come down to orthography rather than grammar. For example, an orthography which didn't use "Arabic" numerals probably wouldn't use them to mark footnotes, at least not in the ordered, numerical way they are meant when they are used with the Roman letters typically used for English. Though the same symbols may well be commandeered for use as random symbols to be used like asterisks. Though I don't know any actual standard conventions for such things in other than English, so I could be wrong even about this. But my point with this hypothetical example is that typesetting is much more closely linked to the orthography than the grammar. Supposing I or someone else made a whole new orthography that worked entirely differently than anything I've actually seen or heard of before, I'd have the exact same typography questions to answer all over again anyway.

So I suppose the question becomes, then, would an orthography (including such typesetting conventions) be considered "valid" according to the various lojbanic principles? I remember one of the big deal ones being that for a given speech stream, there is one spelling for it, and vice versa. Though it has been a while since I read those things, and I might not be remembering it or it's accepted interpretation correctly.

.imu'omi'e .skaryzgik.

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