Re: [lojban] la .alis.

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

On 28 Aug 2012, at 13:41, iesk wrote:

> Btw, I think that {«lu … li’u»} looks better than {lu« … »li'u}. I think that «Swiss» looks better than »German«, and »German« looks better than »Swedish», but as you can see, different people do things in different ways and are used to different styles.

I don't propose to use {lu« … »li'u}... I propose to use {lu «…» li'u}.

> Regarding for Mr Christopher Plummer’s hypothetical performance: I think he could do {«lu … li’u»} just fine, as French narrators apparently have no problems with {« Quotation quotation, says the speaker, quotation quotation. »}.

I propose to use {«Quotation quotation,» says the speaker, «quotation quotation.»} regardless of the French practice; but even so:

« Je crains bien de ne pouvoir pas m’expliquer, » dit Alice, « car, voyez-vous, je ne suis plus moi-même. »

> In some books, a single opening quotation marks the beginning of a whole block of dialogue, which ends with a single closing quotation mark. In other books, there is an opening quotation mark at the beginning of every single line of text, and just one closing mark at the end.

What, in French? Well, that wasn't Carroll's practice in an ycase. 

> Many people are used to ‘technical’ (character-exact) quotation today, but that’s not the only way to use quotation marks. In Lojban, especially, we can take some liberties because, supposedly, real confusion cannot arise.

Then there shouldn't be any difficulties in taking conservative Victorian "liberties". :-)

> I think the style adopted for http://alis.lojban.org/ is good.

To me each paragraph is still just a wall of words, though there are some quotation marks and parentheses there. I don't see it as admirable either in terms of functionality or Latin-script aesthetics.

On 28 Aug 2012, at 14:38, Jonathan Jones wrote:

> My personal preference would be to not have foreign symbols at all. I have seen Lojban written without punctuation, and I have seen Lojban written with punctuation, and between the two, with is ugly as sin. I find such punctuation distracting and repugnant.

I am sure some of you will repudiate my Alice. But some of you may find it interesting. I think it's weird though to have this discussion. I am reminded of what John said a while back:

On 28 Mar 2010, at 13:00, John Cowan wrote:

> We have all sorts of orthographies for Lojban by now, from Cyrillic to Tengwar, and nobody says that they are "not Lojban".  I think I understand why some people don't like a traditional-Latin orthography: it's an instance of "the uncanny valley", just enough like what you're used to to be upsetting.  But the very fact that the two orthographies are isomorphic shows that the essential Lojbanity of the text is preserved.
> 
> (Which is to say nothing about the fact that the text isn't exactly straight down the middle semantically.)


Michael

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