Re: [lojban] Alice essay

[Craig Daniel <craigbdaniel@gmail.com>]

>> > - “lu”…“li'u” still missing. Damning or not, not using the quotes
>> > changes the sense of the sentences. Try to read the text aloud,
>> > maybe you’ll see (or hear) the problem here. Indentation other other
>> > typographic conventions should never replace words in Lojban.
>> >
>>
>> While I would have used quotes there, but I'm not going to argue with
>> xorxes when it comes to stylistic choices.
> How can this be a matter of style? In my eyes it is simply wrong to
> omit quotes where quotes actually belong to.
> If you read the text to someone aloud the listener doesn’t hear the
> indentation and therefore doesn’t hear the quotes which are not there.
> Since in spoken form, the length of pauses and intonation is
> meaningless in Lojban, it is impossible to know that quotes belong here.
> The resulting text has either a different sense or becomes
> ungrammatical.
> And as a “style issue” (which it isn’t) it is not even used
> consistently. The other indentations use quotes but this section
> doesn’t. Why this inconsistence?

lu/li'u aren't quotation marks, they're linguistic quotatives. To
include them is to translate the text as having said "(s)he said:" or
similar, which it sometimes does and sometimes does not. To insist
that they be present even when reading the English text aloud has the
reader's voice switch unannounced from speaking the narrator's words
to the characters' is to mistranslate the text. It is the task of a
translator to render a source text comprehensibly in the target
language, not to damage the source text's structure out of deference
to an assumed lack of intelligence or awareness on the part of the
reader.

You're right that a naive reading that does not understand the context
of how English narrative works will see the lack of verbal quote tags
and interpret it as having the wrong sense, because in Lojban quotes
are generally introduced with one of several cmavo. But I don't read
translations from other languages in utter ignorance of the
conventions of their cultures of origin, and I do not want deliberate
inaccuracies in the translation introduced on the assumption that I
lack even a basic knowledge of the context in which the original
arose. (There's even typesetting clues to aid in spotting when that
convention is at play, though you're right to insist that typesetting
should never be essential to the understanding of Lojban text.)

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.