Subject: Re: [lojban] optional punctuation

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 09:43:59 EDT

In a message dated 7/8/2001 4:32:56 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> To me, the preface is not part of the paedagogy of the lessons; there's
> usage in there, after all, that's not covered in the lessons. Nonetheless,
> it has been pointed out to me that there is conflict between using optional
> punctuation in the preface, and saying that punctuation is not necessary in
> Lesson 1. I don't think there is such conflict ("not necessary" !=
> "banned", "thousand flowers bloom", yadda yadda); but what do you think?
> Harmful eccentricity, or needless confusion? If there's enough consensus,
> I'll kill them. (Kicking and screaming, admittedly.)
> 

As the first bit of Lojban the student sees, it ought to be a pure specimen. 
A questionable premise, I suppose. If the students notice -- and they may 
not, they may well wonder what the critters are when they come to the section 
that assures them that they are not punctuation (yes, it only says 
punctuation is not needed, not that it is forbidden -- but it gives no hints 
about how it might be used, and, indeed, there aren't any general 
conventions). If they are linguistically more sophisticated, they may go off 
like pi,er into clicks and glottal stops (curiously not mentioned in the 
phonology). 
On the other hand, I share everyone so far's horror of endless unbroken lines 
of lower case text, broken only by an occasional period and a slather of 
apostrohes. And I am constantly getting bogged down in the involutions of 
some people's clausal structures, for which the odd comma (or superfluous 
{kei} even) would be an enormous help. The complaint about the intro was 
just that of presentation and conflict with what was about to be said, not 
with the notion of punctuation per se. Maybe, when all these clauses get 
introduced, a few words about the civility of writing and the use of 
punctuation to aid that could be made to legitimate the whole thing?