Re: [lojban] la .alis.

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

On 26 Aug 2012, at 13:40, Jonathan Jones wrote:

>>>> 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.

Sorry, no. You're employing semantic legerdemain here, based on the polysemy of "mark". 

Many languages use particles to indicate various states of discourse. Irish and Chinese and Esperanto have words that are used when a word is a question. In English, we often state out loud "quote" and "unquote" when we are *speaking* and citing someone else. That habit probably arose out of literacy, but nevertheless, English has (optional) particles "quote" and "unquote" and Lojban has obligatory particles "liu" and "li'u" (and "nio", and "to" and "toi" and others). Those particles exist in speech. Writing has nothing to do with it. The only language that can't exist without writing is Blissymbols, as it has no phonology.

> As to the rest of your comment- you are now arguing my side for me.

I shouldn't think so.

> 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.

all punctuation is decorative because the language exists without it there isnt necessarily any requirement that punctuation be used and in fact most languages historically have started their lives without much punctuation some languages like latin and greek didnt even put spaces between words now of course we find it very convenient to decorate our texts with punctuation and capital letters and those sorts of things it is easier to navigate a text when these little quote decorative unquote marks are use dont you agree if you dont why dont you it seems quite obvious and it is certainly the case that historically writing preceded punctuation and punctuation developed from simple like the space or the dot to complex like the inverted interrobang

What I was trying to say about "purely decorative" is that in principle capitalization and non-alphabetic punctuation marks could be added or removed from a text in Lojban without affecting the actual text as it might be read or said aloud. 

That is why would disagree with *replacing* "lu" by "«" or "li'u" by "»": if you later stripped out the punctuation the text would not be the same.

>>> 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.

I don't agree. Lojban was designed so that certain functional categories, like "citation" and "parenthesis", had particles reflecting those categories, including beginning and ending particles. That isn't the same thing as saying that "it made the punctuation be words", which I think is a simplistic reduction of the actual intent. These particles (which are words, not "punctuation" which are graphs) do make Lojban more precise than many other languages, in this regard 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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