Subject: [lojban] Re: [Announcement] The Alice Translation Has Moved And Changed

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 10:11:33 -0400 (EDT)

And Rosta scripsit:

> Typographic tradition is per script. Lojban did not create its own script.
> It borrowed the roman alphabet.

Broadly, yes, but there are individual-language typographic traditions, too:

1) The Polish acute accent is shorter and stubbier than the Western one.

2) French likes to put spaces in front of certain terminal punctuations,
notably semicolon and colon, and also inside guillemets.

3) Quotation marks have at least six flavors in Europe alone:

6-quotes ... 9-quotes (English, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Turkish)
9-quotes ... 9-quotes (Scandinavian langs)
low-9-quotes ... 6-quotes (German, Czech, Slovak)
low-9-quotes ... 9-quotes (Hungarian, Polish)
guillemets pointing in (Slovene, German sometimes)
guillemets pointing out (French, Greek, Russian)

4) Some languages like initial dashes for dialogue, some don't.

5) French c-cedilla can be written with a detached comma below, but not so
in Portuguese or Catalan. Turkish insists on s-cedilla, Romanian on
s-comma-below for /S/. (The story for Gagauz, which is a Turkic lang
spoken in Romania, is still uncertain.)

6) Inverted punctuation marks are unique to Spanish.

7) Lojban uses dots at the beginnings of words. :-)

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