Re: [lojban] la .alis.

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

On 26 Aug 2012, at 09:32, Jonathan Jones wrote:

>> Daddy is reading a story to Mary. Daddy is doing the voices. Does Daddy-as-narrator say "lu" and "li'u", or does Daddy-as-Alice say "lu" and "li'u"?
>> 
>> The way you have it, with lu« and li'u», would imply that Daddy-as-narrator says "lu" but that Daddy-as-Alice will say "li'u".
> 
> No, because the "»" is not the ending quotation mark. The "li'u" is.

No, because "li'u" is a quotation-ending word, not quotation-ending punctuation. Punctuation and capitalization is merely decorative: the words of the text as spoken should be the same as the words of the text as written, and any use of punctuation and capitalization may be made for clarity can easily be stripped out and the underlying text would be the same. 

>> Regarding "xu?" the typographical stricture is rather odd. In Chinese one asks "Ni hao ma?" where there is a redundant question mark by the question particle. In Irish one asks "An bhfuil tú ceart go leor?" with the question mark ending the sentence -- but the question particle is the first word "an". Nevertheless one does not write "An? dtuigeann tú."
> 
> It may be odd, but it's Lojban. A lot of things in Lojban are "odd".

That doesn't make them user-friendly or functional. :-)

> And in this respect, All foreign symbols, such as !?"«»#$ etc., are entirely redundant and only serve to help non-proficient readers.

They are redundant, yes, and may "serve to help non-proficient readers" but that is not their only function. Punctuation and capitalization are the rule and not the exception for languages which write using the Latin script. Since most everyone who comes to Lojban comes to it from one of those languages, it makes little sense for Lojban to jettison typographic richness for an aesthetic of sparseness. (That's my opinion anyway.)

> In this respect it is more like your Chinese example, as the symbols are /always/ adjacent to the Lojban word they represent.

They are "always" there only when people choose to put them there. Esperanto's question particle "ĉu" comes at the beginning of a sentences just as the Lojban "xu" often does, yet the question mark is placed at the end of the sentence in Esperanto without any loss of meaning or confusion.

Michael

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