From rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org Mon Jul 09 09:55:21 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_2_0); 9 Jul 2001 16:55:20 -0000 Received: (qmail 80012 invoked from network); 9 Jul 2001 16:55:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 9 Jul 2001 16:55:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO chain.digitalkingdom.org) (64.169.75.101) by mta1 with SMTP; 9 Jul 2001 16:55:19 -0000 Received: from rlpowell by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 3.22 #1 (Debian)) id 15JeJb-00060H-00 for ; Mon, 09 Jul 2001 09:55:19 -0700 Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 09:55:19 -0700 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] optional punctuation Message-ID: <20010709095519.C32090@digitalkingdom.org> Mail-Followup-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.18i From: Robin Lee Powell On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 05:50:14PM +0100, And Rosta wrote: > 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 use the vim context highliting mode, which colors the different types differently. It's wonderful. -Robin -- http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ BTW, I'm male, honest. le datni cu djica le nu zifre .iku'i .oi le so'e datni cu to'e te pilno je xlali -- RLP http://www.lojban.org/