Subject: RE: [lojban] optional punctuation

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 17:50:14 +0100

Nick:
> You will have noticed that the Lojban-language preface of the lessons uses
> optional punctuation, including ! and ; . I myself think optional
> punctuation is a good and wondrous thing, because I find slabs of lowercase
> Lojban with no punctuation and capitalisation indigestible. (I am very much
> aware that punctuation and capitalisation are Western-only conventions;
> then again, so is learning to read Latin script.)

Since punctuation is normally part of the orthographic rule set of a language,
but it isn't part of Lojban's orthographic rule set, I wonder whether there
are any feasible purely typographic solutions to the also to me real problem
of slabs of relieflessly lowercase Lojban. For example, extra spaces could
be left between sentences, stuff within lu quotes could be italicized, and
so on. More unorthodoxly, one could, say, switch fonts for attidinals,
shrink fonts for terminators, increase intercharacter spacing for the
main word of the selbri, and use degrees of interword spacing to help
indicate the phrase structure of the sentence [as per the speaker not as
per the official grammar].

I realize this sort of thing is up to the individual author, but I mention
it because the usage in materials published by LLG will have some sort of
normative force.

--And.