On Sun, Aug 26, 2012 at 6:37 AM, Michael Everson
<michael.everson@gmail.com> wrote:
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.
The fact that {li'u} is a word, not a symbol, does not make it any less a mark. It marks the end of the quote. It is, therefore, a mark. As to the rest of your comment- you are now arguing my side for me. If the purely decorative punctuation has no effect on the text, then obviously- from the text's viewpoint, and therefore the reader's as well- which side the « and » has no effect on when the falsetto speaking begins and ends. However, I know of no language- written in Latin orthography or otherwise- in which punctuation is purely decorative /except/ in cases where the language has /words/ as punctuation, as Lojban does, and in these cases the "purely decorative" symbols are rarely if ever used.
>> 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.)
Lojban didn't jettison for aesthetic reasons. It did so specifically to attempt to maximize, as you say, "the words of the text as spoken should be the same as the words of the text as written". By making the punctuation be words, the level of similarity between spoken Lojban and written Lojban is nearly one to one., and much, much higher than languages in any script that use punctuation symbols.
> 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