From a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com Mon Jul 09 09:51:42 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_2_0); 9 Jul 2001 16:51:42 -0000 Received: (qmail 3038 invoked from network); 9 Jul 2001 16:51:02 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by l10.egroups.com with QMQP; 9 Jul 2001 16:51:02 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO relay3-gui.server.ntli.net) (194.168.4.200) by mta3 with SMTP; 9 Jul 2001 16:51:02 -0000 Received: from m341-mp1-cvx2b.bre.ntl.com ([62.253.85.85] helo=andrew) by relay3-gui.server.ntli.net with smtp (Exim 3.03 #2) id 15Je0Y-0003ko-00 for lojban@yahoogroups.com; Mon, 09 Jul 2001 17:35:39 +0100 To: Subject: RE: [lojban] optional punctuation Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 17:50:14 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 From: "And Rosta" 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.