On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 6:23 AM, Michael Everson
<michael.everson@gmail.com> wrote:
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".
No I'm not. I am using the same sense of "mark" each time. The fact that you are confusing "mark" with "symbol" is not my fault.
<snip>
> 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
I do not share your opinion that punctuation is optional in the English language. It is a known fact that Lojban /does not use/ punctuation.
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.
Well, of course, excepting the "capitalization" bit, since Lojban uses capitalization to mark non-standard stress, because Lojban doesn't /use/ punctuation /at all/. That's akin to saying the addition or removal of guns from a lion pride would not affect the actual deadliness of the pride.
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.
I am not the one who argued for that, so I have no idea why you're talking about with me. I am not in favor of punctuation /at all/, and since we had this argument already, back when you originally proposed to include Lojban among your multi-lingual collection.
>>> 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.
It doesn't matter if you agree. It's a fact. Facts don't change just because you don't like them.
> 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