la .alis.
Michael Everson
> He "offered" to publish it for us.
I suggested that I might publish it, yes.
> He then insisted on changing the layout and punctuation to match English, and refused to publish it any other way.
Layout? The layout is in paragraphs, which match one-to-one with Carroll's paragraphs. In terms of fonts, yes, I would use Liberty and De Vinne and Mona Lisa Recut and the Engraver's fonts.
English? No, the suggestion was not to "match English", but to take advantage of some conventions which have been common to all Latin-script languages for centuries.
Refused? You've already got a 69-page monofont text (looks like TeX to me) PDF available, and electronic formats which your computers can parse. What value would there be in me putting out a similar edition -- especially in the context of a range of translations of Alice?
Currently published are Cornish, English, Esperanto, German, and Irish.
In the works are French, Italian, Manx, Scots, Shaw Alphabet, Swedish, Ulster Scots, and Welsh.
Possibilities are at least Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, Lojban, and Scottish Gaelic.
> That is, he wanted it to look like this:
>
> Mi klama la Bast,n. I la Bab cusku "lu mi klama li'u"
Not quite. But I'd be very interested to talk with people about the various options one might have for punctuation markup.
> Caps at start of sentences, quote marks, a few other things I can't remember.
Caps for proper names (la Alis), and anomalous stress marked by acute accents rather than by capitalization (which is thereby freed for other use). Near as I can tell the only word in the text affected by this is "la meri,An" ("la Meri,Án" or "la Meri,án"; the original is "Mary Ann").
> We (people on IRC at the time), umm, kinda told him where to stick that idea. In pretty clear terms.
My memory of the IRC was not so black and white. You, and some others, expressed a lack of interest in an edition with "Victorian" typography, and criticized the notion of doing so. But everyone did not share that view. Pages like http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban+typography and http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Punctuation suggest that there is no blanket ban on punctuation, for instance.
> I don't think he likes us anymore.
I like you fine. I just disagree with your stance on punctuation and typographic conventions.
I also like Lewis Carroll, and good typography. I find long paragraphs with no clear visual indication of sentence boundaries to be bewildering. I am sure that computers and savants find it quite simple to parse. I as a multilingual trained linguist expert in writing systems, I still find it much easier to navigate the language when standard Latin-script conventions are used.
My English and Cornish editions are used in Cornwall by learners who find it helpful to compare the two texts. Thing which helps learners to navigate a paragraph are sentence boundaries, capitalized proper names, question marks, and so on.
Indeed, in http://www.lojban.org/publications/reference_grammar/chapter3.html, we find the following.
"Technically, the period is an optional reminder to the reader of a mandatory pause that is dictated by the rules of the language; because these rules are unambiguous, a missing period can be inferred from otherwise correct text. Periods are included only as an aid to the reader."
In for a penny, in for a pound. Full stops are not necessary; they are redundant. So too are quotation marks, and since anomalous stress can be more congenially marked with the acute accent (as in Spanish) than by SHOUTING, there's no reason an edition of a text could not choose to do that, and thereby permit capital letters to be used, redundantly, to mark the beginnings of sentences, proper names, and whatnot.
You, Robin, and maybe even many Lojbanists, might believe that such redundancy is irrelevant, un-useful, wrong-headed, ugly, stupid, or just plain "wrong". I rather doubt that all 464 members of this discussion forum will hold such extreme views, though. Redundancy is harmless -- indeed, we don't speak with punctuation marks in English or Irish or any other languages. Lojban's "audio-visual isomorphism" is extremely cool. But centuries of Latin typographic practice have evolved because those practices are *useful* to readers (as useful as the full stop) and I can see no reason not to pursue my project just because you and a few others on IRC, "umm, kinda told me where to stick" the idea.
I would appreciate it if anyone who *is* interested in this would say so, as I'd like to discuss the options regarding redundant markup of quoted material.
Best regards,
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Michael Everson
Jorge Llambías
> Robin said:
>
>> That is, he wanted it to look like this:
>>
>> Mi klama la Bast,n. I la Bab cusku "lu mi klama li'u"
>
> Not quite. But I'd be very interested to talk with people about the various options one might have for punctuation markup.
Punctuation markup has been used for Lojban texts in the past,
although not quite in that way.
>> Caps at start of sentences, quote marks, a few other things I can't remember.
>
> Caps for proper names (la Alis), and anomalous stress marked by acute accents rather than by capitalization (which is thereby freed for other use). Near as I can tell the only word in the text affected by this is "la meri,An" ("la Meri,Án" or "la Meri,án"; the original is "Mary Ann").
I'm all in favor of not using caps to mark stress. The acute accent is
fine for me, but unnecessary. I don't think caps for proper names is
such a good idea though.
> I find long paragraphs with no clear visual indication of sentence boundaries to be bewildering. I am sure that computers and savants find it quite simple to parse. I as a multilingual trained linguist expert in writing systems, I still find it much easier to navigate the language when standard Latin-script conventions are used.
The sentence separator ".i" is visually quite distinct though. It may
be that I'm just too used to Lojban by now, but I find caps at the
start of Lojban sentences more distracting than helpful. Would you
have the ".i" capitalized, or the first letter of the following word?
> In for a penny, in for a pound. Full stops are not necessary; they are redundant. So too are quotation marks, and since anomalous stress can be more congenially marked with the acute accent (as in Spanish) than by SHOUTING, there's no reason an edition of a text could not choose to do that, and thereby permit capital letters to be used, redundantly, to mark the beginnings of sentences, proper names, and whatnot.
Personally, I like to reserve capital letters for letter names, so "A"
instead of "abu", "B" instead of "by", and so on, just like "1" can
stand for "pa", "2" for "re" and so on. It would be interesting to see
how the Alice text looks with that convention, given the use of letter
names as pronouns,
> Lojban's "audio-visual isomorphism" is extremely cool.
I wish someone would explain what "audio-visual isomorphism" is
supposed to mean. Is it something more than "phonemic orthography"?
There is and never has been any strict isomorphism between the spoken
and the written forms of a Lojban text, as far as I can see. Why are
Lojbanists so fond of crazy terminology?
> But centuries of Latin typographic practice have evolved because those practices are *useful* to readers (as useful as the full stop) and I can see no reason not to pursue my project just because you and a few others on IRC, "umm, kinda told me where to stick" the idea.
Please do pursue it. (The full stop is not used in Lojban as in the
Latin typographic practice though.)
> I would appreciate it if anyone who *is* interested in this would say so, as I'd like to discuss the options regarding redundant markup of quoted material.
I'm interested.
mu'o mi'e xorxes
Jonathan Jones
> That is, he wanted it to look like this:
> Mi klama la Bast,n. I la Bab cusku "lu mi klama li'u"
Not quite. But I'd be very interested to talk with people about the various options one might have for punctuation markup.
> Caps at start of sentences, quote marks, a few other things I can't remember.
Caps for proper names (la Alis), and anomalous stress marked by acute accents rather than by capitalization (which is thereby freed for other use). Near as I can tell the only word in the text affected by this is "la meri,An" ("la Meri,Án" or "la Meri,án"; the original is "Mary Ann").
> We (people on IRC at the time), umm, kinda told him where to stick that idea. In pretty clear terms.
My memory of the IRC was not so black and white. You, and some others, expressed a lack of interest in an edition with "Victorian" typography, and criticized the notion of doing so. But everyone did not share that view. Pages like http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban+typography and http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Punctuation suggest that there is no blanket ban on punctuation, for instance.
> I don't think he likes us anymore.
I like you fine. I just disagree with your stance on punctuation and typographic conventions.
I also like Lewis Carroll, and good typography. I find long paragraphs with no clear visual indication of sentence boundaries to be bewildering. I am sure that computers and savants find it quite simple to parse. I as a multilingual trained linguist expert in writing systems, I still find it much easier to navigate the language when standard Latin-script conventions are used.
My English and Cornish editions are used in Cornwall by learners who find it helpful to compare the two texts. Thing which helps learners to navigate a paragraph are sentence boundaries, capitalized proper names, question marks, and so on.
Indeed, in http://www.lojban.org/publications/reference_grammar/chapter3.html, we find the following.
"Technically, the period is an optional reminder to the reader of a mandatory pause that is dictated by the rules of the language; because these rules are unambiguous, a missing period can be inferred from otherwise correct text. Periods are included only as an aid to the reader."
In for a penny, in for a pound. Full stops are not necessary; they are redundant. So too are quotation marks, and since anomalous stress can be more congenially marked with the acute accent (as in Spanish) than by SHOUTING, there's no reason an edition of a text could not choose to do that, and thereby permit capital letters to be used, redundantly, to mark the beginnings of sentences, proper names, and whatnot.
You, Robin, and maybe even many Lojbanists, might believe that such redundancy is irrelevant, un-useful, wrong-headed, ugly, stupid, or just plain "wrong". I rather doubt that all 464 members of this discussion forum will hold such extreme views, though. Redundancy is harmless -- indeed, we don't speak with punctuation marks in English or Irish or any other languages. Lojban's "audio-visual isomorphism" is extremely cool. But centuries of Latin typographic practice have evolved because those practices are *useful* to readers (as useful as the full stop) and I can see no reason not to pursue my project just because you and a few others on IRC, "umm, kinda told me where to stick" the idea.
I would appreciate it if anyone who *is* interested in this would say so, as I'd like to discuss the options regarding redundant markup of quoted material.
Best regards,
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
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mu'o mi'e .aionys.
.i.a'o.e'e ko klama le bende pe denpa bu
Michael Everson
> Lojban doesn't have "punctuation".
No spoken language has writing of any kind. Until it is employed.
> For example, Lojban's equivalent to "?" is {xu}, as in {xu do jimpe mi}, which means "Do you understand me?"
So? Chinese has in interrogative particle, "ma": "你好吗？ Nǐ hǎo ma?" 'Are you well?'; Irish has an interrogative particle, "an": "An dtuigeann tú?" 'do you understand?' In both languges, the question mark is arguably redundant. Yet it is written, as an aid to readers.
> While Lojban does have 3 special characters- {.}, {,}, and {'}, they are used as letters, not as punctuation.
Yes, and they are even optional (well, I shouldn't think that the last ought to be optional).
> The correct form of the Lojban {mi klama la.bast,n. .i la.bab cusku lu mi klama li'u} is {mi klama la.bAst,n. .i la.bab cusku lu mi klama li'u}
Correct? Common, certainly. "Standard", perhaps, even. THough I haven't seen la.bab run together in most texts.
>> Caps for proper names (la Alis), and anomalous stress marked by acute accents rather than by capitalization (which is thereby freed for other use). Near as I can tell the only word in the text affected by this is "la meri,An" ("la Meri,Án" or "la Meri,án"; the original is "Mary Ann").
>
> Capitalization in Lojban is used to mark non-standard stress.
Notice that I already acknowledged this. Capitalization is a convention commonly used in Lojban to mark non-standard stress.
> In Lojban, all words are stressed on the second-to-last syllable, except in names, when marked by capitalizing either the entire syllable or just the vowel of the syllable that gets primary stress. la.meri,an. is thus pronounced la.merI,an., stressed on "ri", whereas la.meri,An is stressed on "an".
And yet there is no particular utility in this convention. It just looks LIKE SHOUTING. Spanish, one of the source languges for Lojban vocabulary, uses the acute accent to mark anomalous stress. If one does that, then one may be free to use capitalization in the conventional way it is used in other Latin-script languages. This enhances the readability of a text to anyone used to the convention (as most of us have been since we were four or five years of age).
> The Punctuation page describes where and how it is acceptable to use punctuation. However, such punctuation in not part of Lojban.
"Part of"? Is writing in Latin script "part of" Lojban? I see that there are Cyrillic and Tengwar orthographies. Are they "part of" Lojban?
> {xu? do jimpe mi} is {xu do jimpe mi} with a non-Lojbanic character inserted to indicate that {xu} is a question word.
Actually I wouldn't consider that to be useful. The speaker of Chinese or Irish knows that "ma" and "an" are interrogative particles. The whole sentence is marked with a question mark, as a matter of convention. One would not write *"An? dtuigeann tú".
> {mi cusku lu" mi cliva "li'u} is {mi cusku lu mi cliva li'u} with non-lojbanic characters inserted to indicate the begin and ending quote words.
Yes, I know.
> They are NOT part of Lojban writing, have never been used in any Lojban writing I've seen, and only serve one purpose, to my knowledge- which is, to help beginning learners remember what certain words do.
And there is something wrong with that?
I pointed out that my Cornish edition of Alice is used alongside the English edition by learners. The fact that they use similar typographic conventions is an advantage to the learners, in finding their place when making comparisons, for instance.
> Since I I highly doubt that someone so new to the Lojban language that they can't even remember what {xu} or {li'u} means without a foreign character put in the text would be able to read {la.alis.}, such foreign punctuation has no place in the text.
Yes, well, we remember what "an" means in Irish, and also the negative interrogative particle "nach", and yet we are quite happy to write the question mark at the end of the sentence.
> > I don't think he likes us anymore.
>
> I like you fine. I just disagree with your stance on punctuation and typographic conventions.
>
> Our stance is, use Lojban punctuation and typography. It's that simple.
I did not say that I did not understand your stance. I said that I disagreed with it.
> I also like Lewis Carroll, and good typography. I find long paragraphs with no clear visual indication of sentence boundaries to be bewildering. I am sure that computers and savants find it quite simple to parse. I as a multilingual trained linguist expert in writing systems, I still find it much easier to navigate the language when standard Latin-script conventions are used.
>
> As far as I'm concerned, you're perfectly allowed to insert line breaks and paragraphs in the appropriate locations. For instance, "ni'o <text> ni'o <text>" would be fine as:
> "
> ni'o <text>
>
> ni'o <text>
> "
>
> {ni'o} being equivalent to the paragraph in English. ({ni'oni'o} being section, {ni'oni'oni'o} being chapter, etc.)
Really? Did you know that {ni'o} does not occur even once in Xorxe's translation of Alice? {ni'oni'o} occurs at the beginning of each chapter.
> Indeed, in http://www.lojban.org/publications/reference_grammar/chapter3.html, we find the following.
>
> "Technically, the period is an optional reminder to the reader of a mandatory pause that is dictated by the rules of the language; because these rules are unambiguous, a missing period can be inferred from otherwise correct text. Periods are included only as an aid to the reader."
>
> A period is not necessary if a space is used, a space is not necessary if a period is used.
Fine. If the text uses spaces between words, then the full stop can be used, redundantly, at the border between the end of a sentence and before space preceding the {i} which begins the next sentence.
As I pointed out the 69-page PDF of Alice doesn't have any full stops in it at all.
> As such, {mi tavla do la.alis.}, could also be written {mi tavla do la .alis.}, {mi tavla do la alis}, or the horribly atrocious looking and much frowned upon {mitAvladola.alis.}, all of which are the exact same utterance.
Yes, because spoken language is just an utterance. This is really all very elementary writing theory. Obviously utterances can be written in various ways. In Burmese and Thai, they do not put anything at all between words. Theyjustrunthemalltogher andthenusespacestoseparateclauses.
> My personal preference is, when a glottal stop would be pronounced when speaking something, to choose the period over the space, as in {mi tavla do la.alis.}. Other people prefer to not ever use the period in writing, as in {mi tavla do la alis}. The CLL, the official reference grammar, at no point omits either, and would write it as {mi tavla do la .alis.}. Any of these conventions regarding {denpabu} is fine by me, as they are all {lo lojbo}.
Now, now. Conventions are devised by people. In the Latin script, certain conventions are used for most languages. Capitals at the beginning of sentences, full stops at the end, capitals for personal names. Sure, when Lojban was devised, other conventions were used. That does not mean that text in Lojban ceases to be Lojban if traditional Latin casing and punctuation conventions are used. After all, if Tengwar can be used, or Cyrillic, then why should there be some sort of "ban" on using "Victorian typographic conventions" for a book written in the nineteenth century? It's just a convention. You might not prefer it. You've stated that you've got preferences.
> Certainly, you can write {la.meri,An.} as {la.meri,án.}. Accents are an acceptable form of non-standard stress demarcation.
Really? Since the beginning of the language? Or is this a more recent innovation?
> However, {la.Meri,án.} is just plain wrong.
No, it's just not a familiar convention. There's nothing "wrong" about it. It would be pronounced just exactly the same way. As it would if it were
> Lojban does not capitalise proper nouns. Lojban doesn't even have nouns. The name of Paris in Lojban is {la.parIs.}, or, if you like, {la.parís.}, it is not {la.París.}
There is no intrinsic difference between "la parIs" or "la parís" or "la París". The text is the same. The pronunciation is the same. The conventions are different, that is all.
> Furthermore. The "." is a letter in Lojban. The "?" is not. It might not be strictly necessary to use "." in {lo nu lojbo ciska}, but only because a person proficient in Lojban knows that one goes in that place. {mi klama do la alis la lojban} is still pronounced as {mi klama do la .alis. la .lojban.}, regardless.
It is more a quasi-letter, since it can be omitted entirely. In the convention I am interested in, it would not be used as a letter or quasi-letter.
> In the issue of punctuation, Lojban is more like Japanese then English. For example, to say "You are healthy." in Japanese, is "Ogenki desu". In lojban, {ko kanro}. To ask "Are you healthy?" in Japanese, is "Ogenki desu ka".
While it is true that the question mark is not obligatory in Japanese, both 健全であるか。(with a full stop) and
健全であるか? are acceptable renderings in Japanese.
> In Lojban, {xu ko kanro}. I personally feel that foreign punctuation, such as {?} and {"} would actually be detrimental.
Detrimental? In what way could the use of such redundant marks be "harmful"?
> In other words, far from being the help you seem to think they would be, I see them as a hindrance.
It is clear that you do see them as a "hindrance". As a hindrance to what, may I ask? In the middle of page 43 of the Alice PDF there is a paragraph of ten lines. Not a bit of punctuation in it. It is impossible to tell at a glance if there are any questions in that paragraph.
> I would not be at all surprised if the majority, if not the entirety, of my fellow Lojbanists agreed with me on this.
Jorge has already indicated that he is at least interested in discussing the matter.
I am not, by the way, trying to reform Lojban or change anyone's habits. I am interested, however, in the typography of a particular book, and in a dialogue about legibility and writing conventions. I see from the archives of this list that the question of punctuation and capitalization arise from time to time. I see that John Cowan raised the question in 1992.
Evidently it is an interesting question to some, even if not to you.
Fair enough?
Michael
Adam Mesha (Raizen)
And yet there is no particular utility in this convention. It just looks LIKE SHOUTING. Spanish, one of the source languges for Lojban vocabulary, uses the acute accent to mark anomalous stress. If one does that, then one may be free to use capitalization in the conventional way it is used in other Latin-script languages. This enhances the readability of a text to anyone used to the convention (as most of us have been since we were four or five years of age).
As for the rest of the punctuation, I would say that while standard Lojban has some conventions that are quite unusual in comparison to most languages that use the Latin alphabet, once you have gotten used to them (and everyone who has studied the language a bit has gotten used to them), then using more typical Latin-script conventions with Lojban text looks just as strange as standard Lojban looks to someone like you who isn't used to it.
--
Adam Mesha (Raizen) <adam....@gmail.com>
Timendi causa est nescire.
Michael Everson
> Using only characters that are in the ASCII character set was a design goal of the standard Lojban orthography, and an acute accent mark does not fit with that design goal. (Lojban was designed by Americans :-).
You can hardly expect *me* to be interested in such an outdated 1955 design goals... ;-)
In any case, Jonathan Jones has just said that acute-accented vowels is a tolerable substitute for the capital letter.
Is it? Isn't it?
Ivo Doko
> I would appreciate it if anyone who *is* interested in this would say so, as I'd like to discuss the options regarding redundant markup of quoted material.
I'm also interested.
And Rosta
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 9:19 AM, Michael Everson <eve...@evertype.com> wrote:
>> But centuries of Latin typographic practice have evolved because
>> those practices are *useful* to readers (as useful as the full
>> stop) and I can see no reason not to pursue my project
>
> Latin typographic practice though.)
IMO /./ is a phoneme whose primary allophone is [?]. That does not imply owt about how it shd be rendered graphologically or typographically, tho.
>> I would appreciate it if anyone who *is* interested in this would
>> say so, as I'd like to discuss the options regarding redundant
>> markup of quoted material.
>
> I'm interested.
I'm interested too, and in the general question of how to reconcile the highly evolved traditions of roman typography with Lojban. But it's probably realistic to recognize that most Lojbanists have no interest in such reconciliation, and would wish for the typography to be wholly subjugated to prevailing Lojban conventions.
--And.
Michael Everson
> IMO /./ is a phoneme whose primary allophone is [?]. That does not imply owt about how it shd be rendered graphologically or typographically, tho.
Jonathan wrote {la.parIs.} but it would seem to me to be unlikely that this represents [laʔpaˈrisʔ] with a glottal stop before the [p] and after the [s].
>>> I would appreciate it if anyone who *is* interested in this would say so, as I'd like to discuss the options regarding redundant markup of quoted material.
>>
>> I'm interested.
>
> I'm interested too, and in the general question of how to reconcile the highly evolved traditions of roman typography with Lojban.
Splendid. I'm sure that this will be a good Gedankenexperiment as well, in terms of questions of orthography design and so on.
> But it's probably realistic to recognize that most Lojbanists have no interest in such reconciliation, and would wish for the typography to be wholly subjugated to prevailing Lojban conventions.
That's OK.
Michael
Robin Lee Powell
> >>I would appreciate it if anyone who *is* interested in this
> >>would say so, as I'd like to discuss the options regarding
> >>redundant markup of quoted material.
> >
> >I'm interested.
>
> I'm interested too, and in the general question of how to
> reconcile the highly evolved traditions of roman typography with
> Lojban. But it's probably realistic to recognize that most
> Lojbanists have no interest in such reconciliation, and would wish
> for the typography to be wholly subjugated to prevailing Lojban
> conventions.
I'll speak up (briefly, since it wasn't requested) for that side: I
won't buy a book claiming to be Lojban that uses seriously
non-Lojban-standard typographic conventions, and I will decry it to
anyone who asks.
There is an exception, however: I care very little about how stress
is indicated. Stress marking (specifically between using caps or
using an accent mark) has been a long-standing point of largely
non-acrimonious discussion; as far as I can tell, that's an issue on
which the community is somewhat divided, but no-one really cares all
that much.
Contrast this with using captials to mark the beginning of sentences
or proper names which, as And says, is very much not-OK to most
Lojbanists.
-Robin
--
They say: "The first AIs will be built by the military as weapons."
And I'm thinking: "Does it even occur to you to try for something
other than the default outcome?" See http://shrunklink.com/cdiz
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/
Robin Lee Powell
> On 28 Mar 2010, at 16:22, And Rosta wrote:
>
> > IMO /./ is a phoneme whose primary allophone is [?]. That does
> > not imply owt about how it shd be rendered graphologically or
> > typographically, tho.
>
> Jonathan wrote {la.parIs.} but it would seem to me to be unlikely
> that this represents [laʔpaˈrisʔ] with a glottal stop before the
> [p] and after the [s].
Actually, that's *exactly* what it represents.
Having learned a little bit about what our typograhpic conventions
actually *mean* might result in less hostility.
Michael Everson
>> Jonathan wrote {la.parIs.} but it would seem to me to be unlikely that this represents [laʔpaˈrisʔ] with a glottal stop before the [p] and after the [s].
>
> Actually, that's *exactly* what it represents.
>
> Having learned a little bit about what our typograhpic conventions actually *mean* might result in less hostility.
I have read and understood the relevant sections in What is Lojban? (which John Cowan gave me in 2003) as well as http://www.lojban.org/publications/reference_grammar/chapter3.html
A "pause" is not the same thing as a "glottal stop", and both [ʔp] and final [sʔ] are quite unlikely segments; the first would tend towards becoming a glottalized [p’] and the second... well, is really like following [s] with a cough, which I don't think is the description you intend. Is it?
Of course [laʔ pa] is not particularly unusual. I might point out that I also speak Danish (not as a native) and I'm pretty good with unusual [ʔ] placement.
I don't feel in the least bit hostile. :-)
Michael
Robin Lee Powell
My apologies; you've entirely surpassed my knowledge of formal
phonetics (or whatever this is). All I know is that when I say "la
.parIs." I say "la", and then do what I think is a glottal stop, and
then say "parIs", and then do what I think is a glottal stop.
*shrug*
Michael Everson
> I'll speak up (briefly, since it wasn't requested) for that side: I won't buy a book claiming to be Lojban that uses seriously non-Lojban-standard typographic conventions,
Fair enough. Does that mean you wouldn't buy such a book if it were in Tengwar?
> and I will decry it to anyone who asks.
That seems mean-spirited. :-(
Ca'n't you enjoy a bit of fun? (Note how I wrote "ca'n't" there -- just as Carroll did.) Ca'n't you appreciate an exercise in typography using Victorian conventions for a Victorian book?
> There is an exception, however: I care very little about how stress is indicated. Stress marking (specifically between using caps or using an accent mark) has been a long-standing point of largely non-acrimonious discussion; as far as I can tell, that's an issue on which the community is somewhat divided, but no-one really cares all that much.
So... you're flexible when you wish to be. Fair enough. :-)
> Contrast this with using captials to mark the beginning of sentences or proper names which, as And says, is very much not-OK to most Lojbanists.
Well, I'm certainly not the first person to take an interest in such a convention, according to the archives of this list. Sure, plenty of people don't care for it, but at the end of the day I'm not trying to do any harm.
Michael
John Cowan
> I'll speak up (briefly, since it wasn't requested) for that side: I
> won't buy a book claiming to be Lojban that uses seriously
> non-Lojban-standard typographic conventions, and I will decry it to
> anyone who asks.
Dude. You never heard of "All publicity is good publicity"?
I don't see you decrying "la .alis." because of the xorxes-anity of the text.
--
John Cowan co...@ccil.org http://ccil.org/~cowan
I am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws them
alive again from the water. I came from the end of a bag, but no bag
went over me. I am the friend of bears and the guest of eagles. I am
Ringwinner and Luckwearer; and I am Barrel-rider. --Bilbo to Smaug
John Cowan
> A "pause" is not the same thing as a "glottal stop", and both [ʔp] and
> final [sʔ] are quite unlikely segments; the first would tend towards
> becoming a glottalized [p’] and the second... well, is really like
> following [s] with a cough, which I don't think is the description
> you intend. Is it?
Glottal stop and pause are allophones in free variation.
In pronouncing "la .paris.", my tendency is to realize the first period as
a glottal stop in the coda of the previous syllable, /la?/, and then to
realize the second period as a true pause.
--
John Cowan co...@ccil.org http://ccil.org/~cowan
You cannot enter here. Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back!
Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go! --Gandalf
Robin Lee Powell
> On 28 Mar 2010, at 20:29, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
>
> > I'll speak up (briefly, since it wasn't requested) for that
> > side: I won't buy a book claiming to be Lojban that uses
> > seriously non-Lojban-standard typographic conventions,
>
> Fair enough. Does that mean you wouldn't buy such a book if it
> were in Tengwar?
I would not, but for different reasons (Tengwar is a crappy writing
system; too much self-similarity).
The problem I have is that the primary Lojban orthography uses Latin
characters, and what I very much do not want is to have people
showing up and using a non-standard Latin character orthography and
pointing at a published book as justification.
> > and I will decry it to anyone who asks.
>
> That seems mean-spirited. :-(
It's not particularily intended that way.
As one of the half-dozen-or-so people who most often has to deal
with newbies coming up with obnoxious crap ("Why can't Lojban be in
hexademical?" took up many hours of my time once, for example), I
feel fully justified taking steps in advance to avoid additional
rounds of such annoyance.
> Ca'n't you enjoy a bit of fun? (Note how I wrote "ca'n't" there --
> just as Carroll did.)
Certainly, when the bit of fun doesn't add to my workload around
here. Again, as the hardest working person in the community, for
... at least the last 5 years, if not longer (with the possible
exception of Matt Arnold since he took over the book fulfillment),
not pointlessly adding to the crap I have to deal with is high on my
priority list.
> Ca'n't you appreciate an exercise in typography using Victorian
> conventions for a Victorian book?
That's a vacuous argument; are you saying that you would use
Victorian typographic conventions for a version published in Hebrew?
> > There is an exception, however: I care very little about how
> > stress is indicated. Stress marking (specifically between using
> > caps or using an accent mark) has been a long-standing point of
> > largely non-acrimonious discussion; as far as I can tell, that's
> > an issue on which the community is somewhat divided, but no-one
> > really cares all that much.
>
> So... you're flexible when you wish to be. Fair enough. :-)
I suppose.
I'm flexible about things that are not yet 100% formalized, or that
are specifically formalized as flexible, or where a good reason by
my standards exists; "capitalizing the whole syllable looks
ugly/like shouting" seems valid to me; "capitalize proper names
because that's how English does it" most *certainly* does not.
A lot of people in the community (myself included obviously) are
really, *really* averse to any changes that are specifically brought
in from natural languages, *especially* English.
I only speak two languages comfortably; English, and Lojban. I have
to work really hard to avoid my English corrupting my Lojban, and I
do so because if I wanted English, I'd just speak English. Having
someone from outside the community try to apply English conventions
to Lojban and then publish it really bothers me because it's exactly
the opposite of what many of us are trying to do, and publishing it
means it'll be preserved for posterity, so that future generations
of newbies can make our lives more difficult.
(I suppose one could argue that "all caps is shouting" is an English
convention, but I tend to think of it as an Internet convention;
*shrug*)
> > Contrast this with using captials to mark the beginning of
> > sentences or proper names which, as And says, is very much
> > not-OK to most Lojbanists.
>
> Well, I'm certainly not the first person to take an interest in
> such a convention, according to the archives of this list. Sure,
> plenty of people don't care for it, but at the end of the day I'm
> not trying to do any harm.
I'm aware you're not *trying* to. You're going to succeed, though.
Robin Lee Powell
> Robin Lee Powell scripsit:
>
> > I'll speak up (briefly, since it wasn't requested) for that
> > side: I won't buy a book claiming to be Lojban that uses
> > seriously non-Lojban-standard typographic conventions, and I
> > will decry it to anyone who asks.
>
> Dude. You never heard of "All publicity is good publicity"?
I have. I think it's a crock of shit. If a board member was
arrested for beating children and a news article said that ey was a
member of a "strange, made-up language named Lojban", this would
*NOT* be good publicity.
More relevantly to the matter at hand, see my previous post; I
really really don't want to have to deal with a crop of newbies
using some slaughtered Latin orthography because they have a book to
point at so they can tell me I'm wrong and it's OK.
> I don't see you decrying "la .alis." because of the xorxes-anity
> of the text.
Going through it *specifically* for that purpose has been on my
to-do list since it was published. The main reason I haven't done
it yet is that the BPFK needs to finish before I will even *know*
what in xorban and what isn't.
Also, it's *Alice*. I *expect* a bunch of weird uses and coinings
and grammatical errors and suchlike; anything else would be a bad
translation. Seperate issue, though; last I looked (many years ago)
there are somethings in there that are pure xorban, and that I was
Very Much Unhappy With.
Michael Everson
On 28 Mar 2010, at 22:13, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
>> Ca'n't you appreciate an exercise in typography using Victorian conventions for a Victorian book?
>
> That's a vacuous argument; are you saying that you would use Victorian typographic conventions for a version published in Hebrew?
I will probably publish the Yiddish in Latin, with Victorian typographic conventions. For the Russian and Shaw Alphabet versions I am designing font extensions in the same style. (That's a lot of work.)
Michael
Michael Everson
>> I don't see you decrying "la .alis." because of the xorxes-anity
>> of the text.
>
> Going through it *specifically* for that purpose has been on my
> to-do list since it was published. The main reason I haven't done
> it yet is that the BPFK needs to finish before I will even *know*
> what in xorban and what isn't.
>
> Also, it's *Alice*. I *expect* a bunch of weird uses and coinings
> and grammatical errors and suchlike; anything else would be a bad
> translation. Seperate issue, though; last I looked (many years ago)
> there are somethings in there that are pure xorban, and that I was
> Very Much Unhappy With.
Um.
How much is there that is intended to be changed? Does this put my project off... any particular period of time?
Michael
Jonathan Jones
On 28 Mar 2010, at 20:29, Robin Lee Powell wrote:Fair enough. Does that mean you wouldn't buy such a book if it were in Tengwar?
> I'll speak up (briefly, since it wasn't requested) for that side: I won't buy a book claiming to be Lojban that uses seriously non-Lojban-standard typographic conventions,
That seems mean-spirited. :-(
> and I will decry it to anyone who asks.
Ca'n't you enjoy a bit of fun? (Note how I wrote "ca'n't" there -- just as Carroll did.) Ca'n't you appreciate an exercise in typography using Victorian conventions for a Victorian book?
So... you're flexible when you wish to be. Fair enough. :-)
> There is an exception, however: I care very little about how stress is indicated. Stress marking (specifically between using caps or using an accent mark) has been a long-standing point of largely non-acrimonious discussion; as far as I can tell, that's an issue on which the community is somewhat divided, but no-one really cares all that much.
Well, I'm certainly not the first person to take an interest in such a convention, according to the archives of this list. Sure, plenty of people don't care for it, but at the end of the day I'm not trying to do any harm.
> Contrast this with using captials to mark the beginning of sentences or proper names which, as And says, is very much not-OK to most Lojbanists.
Michael
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Jorge Llambías
<rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
>
> There is an exception, however: I care very little about how stress
> is indicated. Stress marking (specifically between using caps or
> using an accent mark) has been a long-standing point of largely
> non-acrimonious discussion; as far as I can tell, that's an issue on
> which the community is somewhat divided, but no-one really cares all
> that much.
And it would be silly anyway to waste much time discussing that
particular issue for Alice, since as Michael pointed out it affects a
single word in the whole book. (Which chapter does the name appear,
BTW? I can't seem to find it.)
I think the only place caps are used in the translation is in:
lu la'e di'u krinu le nu zo CILRE cmene i jdika le ka temci kei lo
cacra be li ba'e CI ca ro djedi be li ba'e RE li'u
Italics is probably a much better idea than caps for that.
> Contrast this with using captials to mark the beginning of sentences
> or proper names which, as And says, is very much not-OK to most
> Lojbanists.
It does look weird once you get used to no caps.
But I think the more interesting typographical question for Alice is
not so much the use of capitals, but how to mark dialogue/quotes. I
find lu"..."li'u quite hideous. I much prefer «lu ... li'u», which I
think is what the ju'i lobypli used to use. Maybe something like this:
i «lu uo —sei la .alis. pensi— ba lo nu farlu tai ti kei mi na ba
xanka le nu farlu fo le serti .i «lu ua virnu —sei le lanzu tu'a mi
ba jinvi li'u» .i .u'o mi noda cusku va'o ji'asai le nu mi farlu fi le
drudi be le zdani (tosa'a la'e di'u la'a jetnu toi) li'u»
Jorge Llambías
>
> Dude. You never heard of "All publicity is good publicity"?
> I don't see you decrying "la .alis." because of the xorxes-anity of the text.
Which particular bit of xorxe-sanity do you have in mind? I doubt my
style in Lojban is so distinctive that given a random Lojban text you
could generally tell whether it had been written by me or not with
much certainty, but it would be interesting to know if there is some
distinctive marker.
Jorge Llambías
<rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 04:06:11PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
>
>> I don't see you decrying "la .alis." because of the xorxes-anity
>> of the text.
>
> Going through it *specifically* for that purpose has been on my
> to-do list since it was published. The main reason I haven't done
> it yet is that the BPFK needs to finish before I will even *know*
> what in xorban and what isn't.
The problem with that is that the BPFK will never finish whatever it
is that it is supposed to finish. The BPFK needs to be reformed along
the lines suggested by your
http://teddyb.org/robin/tiki-index.php?page=Lojban:+You're+Doing+It+Wrong
> Also, it's *Alice*. I *expect* a bunch of weird uses and coinings
> and grammatical errors and suchlike; anything else would be a bad
> translation.
I don't think the translation has many of those though. Maybe one
(intentional) grammatical error, though I don't now remember exactly
where.
> Seperate issue, though; last I looked (many years ago)
> there are somethings in there that are pure xorban, and that I was
> Very Much Unhappy With.
As I said, I would love to hear what those are.
(And I wouldn't mind doing a revision of Alice at some point with
someone else reading along.)
MorphemeAddict
--
Robin Lee Powell
> But I think the more interesting typographical question for Alice
> is not so much the use of capitals, but how to mark
> dialogue/quotes. I find lu"..."li'u quite hideous. I much prefer
> «lu ... li'u», which I think is what the ju'i lobypli used to use.
> Maybe something like this:
>
> i «lu uo —sei la .alis. pensi— ba lo nu farlu tai ti kei mi na ba
> xanka le nu farlu fo le serti .i «lu ua virnu —sei le lanzu tu'a
> mi ba jinvi li'u» .i .u'o mi noda cusku va'o ji'asai le nu mi
> farlu fi le drudi be le zdani (tosa'a la'e di'u la'a jetnu toi)
> li'u»
/me breaks out in hives.
(having said that, I'm aware that this is largely an "I'm not used
to it" reaction; I could probably get over it if someone gave me a
good reason. No-one has.)
Robin Lee Powell
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 6:17 PM, Robin Lee Powell
> <rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> >somethings in there that are pure xorban, and that I was Very
> >Much Unhappy With.
>
> As I said, I would love to hear what those are.
>
> (And I wouldn't mind doing a revision of Alice at some point with
> someone else reading along.)
It's been too many years; when I go back, I'll let you know.
Jorge Llambías
<rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
>>
>> i «lu uo —sei la .alis. pensi— ba lo nu farlu tai ti kei mi na ba
>> xanka le nu farlu fo le serti .i «lu ua virnu —sei le lanzu tu'a
>> mi ba jinvi li'u» .i .u'o mi noda cusku va'o ji'asai le nu mi
>> farlu fi le drudi be le zdani (tosa'a la'e di'u la'a jetnu toi)
>> li'u»
>
> /me breaks out in hives.
>
> (having said that, I'm aware that this is largely an "I'm not used
> to it" reaction; I could probably get over it if someone gave me a
> good reason. No-one has.)
Long uninterrupted text truly is hard to read. A few « », —, ( )
strategically inserted here and there are perfectly kosher for Lojban
(and nothing new in any case, it was standard practice in the ju'i
lobypli journal). Using caps at the beginning of sentences doesn't
make a whole lot of sense to me, that basically amounts to replacing
all ".i" with "I", it's not as if Lojban sentences offer a lot of
variation in how they start (unless the idea was to capitalize the
next word after ".i", that was not very clear to me).
In a text with a lot of dialogue, having a clear visual of what is
said by the characters and what is part of the background text is
useful, and the lu li'u words are not salient enough for that and do
tend to get lost in the middle of the text in long paragraphs. There's
nothing wrong with some experimenting to get more effective
typography. And one advantage of guillemets is they cannot be accused
of being inspired by English.
Robin Lee Powell
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 10:53 PM, Robin Lee Powell
> <rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> i «lu uo —sei la .alis. pensi— ba lo nu farlu tai ti kei mi na
> >> ba xanka le nu farlu fo le serti .i «lu ua virnu —sei le lanzu
> >> tu'a mi ba jinvi li'u» .i .u'o mi noda cusku va'o ji'asai le nu
> >> mi farlu fi le drudi be le zdani (tosa'a la'e di'u la'a jetnu
> >> toi) li'u»
> >
> > /me breaks out in hives.
> >
> > (having said that, I'm aware that this is largely an "I'm not
> > used to it" reaction; I could probably get over it if someone
> > gave me a good reason. No-one has.)
>
> Long uninterrupted text truly is hard to read. A few « », —, ( )
> strategically inserted here and there are perfectly kosher for
> Lojban (and nothing new in any case, it was standard practice in
... Was it really?
You oldbies are nuts.
Jorge Llambías
<rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 11:17:02PM -0300, Jorge Llambías wrote:
>>
>> Long uninterrupted text truly is hard to read. A few « », —, ( )
>> strategically inserted here and there are perfectly kosher for
>> Lojban (and nothing new in any case, it was standard practice in
>> the ju'i lobypli journal). .
>
> ... Was it really?
>
> You oldbies are nuts.
Actually, ju'i lobypli was before my time, but I have copies of most numbers.
Pierre Abbat
> I'm interested too, and in the general question of how to reconcile the
> highly evolved traditions of roman typography with Lojban. But it's
> probably realistic to recognize that most Lojbanists have no interest in
> such reconciliation, and would wish for the typography to be wholly
> subjugated to prevailing Lojban conventions.
The traditions of Roman typography evolved with the languages written in it,
most of which, as they evolved, were Indo-European. I've read in a book about
Turkish, which is a relative newcomer to the alphabet and has its own
convention (shared with a few related languages) about dots on "i", that the
use of the comma in Turkish can be confusing to a native English speaker.
Lojban is quite different from other languages written in the Latin alphabet.
None of them that I know uses spoken quotation marks (though the ending
quotation mark is spoken "iti" in Sanskrit) or sentence separators. I don't
see a problem with writing a punctuation mark for a quotation, but it's not
obvious which side of the word "lu" or the delimiter it should go on.
I see no problem with punctuation marks in Lojban, though some particular
marks pose difficulties:
*The comma may be written at the end of a word to signal a pause in thought,
or several elided terminators in a row, but if it follows a cmevla or
precedes a word beginning with a vowel, the period must be written too.
That's because the comma, inside a word, indicates a syllable break with no
pause, so "la litc, e la alkuist" is equivalent to "la litce la .alkuist".
*The period is commonly written both before and after words to indicate
pauses, and between words with no spaces to indicate semantically joined
words that have to have a pause, such as "na.e" and "kot.divuár". If we're
going to use abbreviations, then (and some unit symbols, such as "ku" (=kDa),
are identical to words), we have to use something other than a period to mark
them. I've suggested the hyphen, but I'm not sure that's the right choice.
The question mark and exclamation mark, I think, should come at the end of the
sentence, not next to the question word. The only other language I know of
which punctuates the question word is Armenian.
On Sunday 28 March 2010 14:25:28 Adam Mesha (Raizen) wrote:
> Using only characters that are in the ASCII character set was a design goal
> of the standard Lojban orthography, and an acute accent mark does not fit
> with that design goal. (Lojban was designed by Americans :-).
The orthography was designed the year before the first draft proposal of
Unicode was published. As Unicode is now widely available on computers, I
think that that design goal should be dropped. I think that the accent mark,
for indicating stress, looks better than a capital letter.
If I were capitalizing sentences, I'd capitalize the word after ".i", not
the ".i" itself. The word after ".i" can begin with any letter except "'"
(which doesn't have a capital form). This is like Afrikaans, in which
sentences often begin with "'n" (the indefinite article), and the word
after "'n", rather than "'n" itself, is capitalized.
Pierre
--
li fi'u vu'u fi'u fi'u du li pa
tso...@aol.com
Can i get these in daily digests? If so how?
Leo Molas
> Robin said:
>
>> He "offered" to publish it for us.
>
> I suggested that I might publish it, yes.
>
>> He then insisted on changing the layout and punctuation to match
>> English, and refused to publish it any other way.
>
> Layout? The layout is in paragraphs, which match one-to-one with
> Carroll's paragraphs. In terms of fonts, yes, I would use Liberty and
> De Vinne and Mona Lisa Recut and the Engraver's fonts.
>
> English? No, the suggestion was not to "match English", but to take
> advantage of some conventions which have been common to all
> Latin-script languages for centuries.
>
> Refused? You've already got a 69-page monofont text (looks like TeX
> to me) PDF available, and electronic formats which your computers can
> parse. What value would there be in me putting out a similar edition
> -- especially in the context of a range of translations of Alice?
>
> Currently published are Cornish, English, Esperanto, German, and
> Irish.
>
> In the works are French, Italian, Manx, Scots, Shaw Alphabet,
> Swedish, Ulster Scots, and Welsh.
>
> Possibilities are at least Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, Lojban, and
> Scottish Gaelic.
>
>> That is, he wanted it to look like this:
>>
>> Mi klama la Bast,n. I la Bab cusku "lu mi klama li'u"
>
> Not quite. But I'd be very interested to talk with people about the
> various options one might have for punctuation markup.
>
>> Caps at start of sentences, quote marks, a few other things I can't
>> remember.
>
> Caps for proper names (la Alis), and anomalous stress marked by acute
> accents rather than by capitalization (which is thereby freed for
> other use). Near as I can tell the only word in the text affected by
> this is "la meri,An" ("la Meri,Án" or "la Meri,án"; the original is
> "Mary Ann").
>
>> We (people on IRC at the time), umm, kinda told him where to stick
>> that idea. In pretty clear terms.
>
> My memory of the IRC was not so black and white. You, and some
> others, expressed a lack of interest in an edition with "Victorian"
> typography, and criticized the notion of doing so. But everyone did
> not share that view. Pages like
> http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban+typography and
> http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Punctuation suggest that there is no
> blanket ban on punctuation, for instance.
>
>> I don't think he likes us anymore.
>
> I like you fine. I just disagree with your stance on punctuation and
> typographic conventions.
>
> I also like Lewis Carroll, and good typography. I find long
> paragraphs with no clear visual indication of sentence boundaries to
> be bewildering. I am sure that computers and savants find it quite
> simple to parse. I as a multilingual trained linguist expert in
> writing systems, I still find it much easier to navigate the language
> when standard Latin-script conventions are used.
>
> My English and Cornish editions are used in Cornwall by learners who
> find it helpful to compare the two texts. Thing which helps learners
> to navigate a paragraph are sentence boundaries, capitalized proper
> names, question marks, and so on.
>
> Indeed, in
> http://www.lojban.org/publications/reference_grammar/chapter3.html,
> we find the following.
>
> "Technically, the period is an optional reminder to the reader of a
> mandatory pause that is dictated by the rules of the language;
> because these rules are unambiguous, a missing period can be inferred
> from otherwise correct text. Periods are included only as an aid to
> the reader."
>
> In for a penny, in for a pound. Full stops are not necessary; they
> are redundant. So too are quotation marks, and since anomalous stress
> can be more congenially marked with the acute accent (as in Spanish)
> than by SHOUTING, there's no reason an edition of a text could not
> choose to do that, and thereby permit capital letters to be used,
> redundantly, to mark the beginnings of sentences, proper names, and
> whatnot.
>
> You, Robin, and maybe even many Lojbanists, might believe that such
> redundancy is irrelevant, un-useful, wrong-headed, ugly, stupid, or
> just plain "wrong". I rather doubt that all 464 members of this
> discussion forum will hold such extreme views, though. Redundancy is
> harmless -- indeed, we don't speak with punctuation marks in English
> or Irish or any other languages. Lojban's "audio-visual isomorphism"
> is extremely cool. But centuries of Latin typographic practice have
> evolved because those practices are *useful* to readers (as useful as
> because you and a few others on IRC, "umm, kinda told me where to
> stick" the idea.
>
> I would appreciate it if anyone who *is* interested in this would say
> so, as I'd like to discuss the options regarding redundant markup of
> quoted material.
>
>
Here comes my humble opinion about this...
You (everson) are going to try this odd version of written lojban. Not
one is going to set you in flames for this, though.
As you said, there are many alternatives for the actual alphabet, and
many discussions about orthography alternatives. However, the way we use
it commonly is the way you'll read it in the IRC or in the books. There
might be better ways to write lojban, and you may writing it better than
us, but the way we write it's the way we like to read it. (I re-wrote
that sentence to not be *that* tautological).
Of course, the way we write it might be modified for good, but that
should be done by the community, more specifically by the LLG (since
it's an ex-cathedra language and all that stuff).
You can, of course, publish your book the way you want. The problem will
be that that will not be written lojban. It could be another isomorphism
from some writings to lojban, but not what's known as written lojban.
For example, I could write a book in English, but I change all
characters 'a' with 'u', and all 'u' with '#' (saying it's because it's
more beautiful or readable). It would be a pain in the ass for all the
English speakers, and, assuming it's actually better, is not going to
really help anyone, since new speakers will be confused.
And about this last point, if anyone get who doesn't speak lojban, and
is interested, he or she will be confused when he start learning lojban.
I think this would be the worst part.
You claim that "centuries of Latin typographic practice have
evolved because those practices are *useful* to readers", well, that's
assuming that they actually evolved. It's not true until it's proved.
Take the natural languages, for example. They evolved for centuries, as
well as their written versions, but they have so many problems, that led
us to develop a language trying to prevent all this faults.
I'm interested in discussing the redundant markup, so as this channel
(the mailing list) is and ever be.
mu'o mi'e .leos.
--
My lojban journal: http://learninglojban.wordpress.com
My personal blog: http://leomolas.tumblr.com
Oren
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.
John Cowan
> I'm flexible about things that are not yet 100% formalized, or that
> are specifically formalized as flexible, or where a good reason by
> my standards exists; "capitalizing the whole syllable looks
> ugly/like shouting" seems valid to me; "capitalize proper names
> because that's how English does it" most *certainly* does not.
Not just English, but essentially *every* language written in Latin,
Greek, or Cyrillic, which amounts to a huge fraction of all the written
languages on the planet. Also, FWIW, Loglan., which originally used
upper/lower case as Lojban does.
(Using the acute accent to mark stress is already optional-standard.)
--
Samuel Johnson on playing the violin: John Cowan
"Difficult do you call it, Sir? co...@ccil.org
I wish it were impossible." http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
John Cowan
> Which particular bit of xorxe-sanity do you have in mind? I doubt my
> style in Lojban is so distinctive that given a random Lojban text you
> could generally tell whether it had been written by me or not with
> much certainty, but it would be interesting to know if there is some
> distinctive marker.
Alas, I no longer remember the details, merely that they existed.
--
John Cowan http://ccil.org/~cowan co...@ccil.org
We want more school houses and less jails; more books and less arsenals;
more learning and less vice; more constant work and less crime; more
leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of
the opportunities to cultivate our better natures. --Samuel Gompers
Michael Everson
> I don't think the translation has many of those though. Maybe one
> (intentional) grammatical error, though I don't now remember exactly
> where.
Curiouser and curiouser" is the intentional error that comes to mind.
'Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).
i lu cizra je za’uzra sei la alis krixa to abu tai se spaji ja’e le nu ze’a tolmorji le nu ta’i makau tavla bau le drani lojbo toi.
By the way http://www.lojban.org/texts/translations/alice/alice.html is an empty page.
Michael Everson
On 28 Mar 2010, at 15:14, Jorge Llambías wrote:
> The sentence separator ".i" is visually quite distinct though. It may be that I'm just too used to Lojban by now, but I find caps at the start of Lojban sentences more distracting than helpful. Would you have the ".i" capitalized, or the first letter of the following word?
Well, then you're going to get a very large number of paragraphs or sentences beginning ".i Lu" and I don't really see how that's better than "I lu".
Part of the goal is to use a typography that Carroll would have found familiar. It's treating Lojban just like any other Latin-script language, not as some sort of thing the Binars use to communicate with. (STTNG episode 16 "11001001".) To the unfocused eye, Lojban is no different from Basque in its non-Indo-Europeanism. ;-)
> Personally, I like to reserve capital letters for letter names, so "A" instead of "abu", "B" instead of "by", and so on, just like "1" can stand for "pa", "2" for "re" and so on. It would be interesting to see how the Alice text looks with that convention, given the use of letter names as pronouns,
Well, the letters have names; I would assume that By, Ly, Fy, Sy, Ny would do as well as Ogham's Beith, Luis, Fearn, Sail, Nion.
On 28 Mar 2010, at 21:01, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> No-one's actually going to *stop* you doing as you like with the "la .alis." text. Well, xorxes could, but I think he already public-domained it?
Aye.
> Anyways, we're not going to sue you or anything like that. I doubt that we'd even get as far as the LLG publically denouncing it (although it's not outside the realm of possibility if the chosen orthography is particularly un-Lojbanic).
If you ran it through a filter to lowercase everything and strip out the punctuation it would be indistinguishable from the Alice PDF on your site.
> My own significant crankiness about the whole idea aside, I appreciate that you've come back to the community to discuss it; I wasn't expecting that after the IRC interaction.
Oddly, I did not have such a bad feeling about that interaction. I regret that you did.
On 28 Mar 2010, at 22:13, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> A lot of people in the community (myself included obviously) are really, *really* averse to any changes that are specifically brought in from natural languages, *especially* English.
Standard Latin-script conventions are not English, though English shares them.
On 28 Mar 2010, at 22:17, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 04:06:11PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
>>
>> Dude. You never heard of "All publicity is good publicity"?
>
> More relevantly to the matter at hand, see my previous post; I really really don't want to have to deal with a crop of newbies using some slaughtered Latin orthography because they have a book to point at so they can tell me I'm wrong and it's OK.
Non-standard orthography or not, I expect that the Victorian typographic conventions will be careful and well-thought out. Not "slaughtered" or careless. But I am at pains to point out that it looks like the discussion of this sort of thing goes back at least 18 years.
>> I don't see you decrying "la .alis." because of the xorxes-anity of the text.
>
> Going through it *specifically* for that purpose has been on my to-do list since it was published. The main reason I haven't done it yet is that the BPFK needs to finish before I will even *know* what in xorban and what isn't.
I ask again: is this a show-stopper? Is the language in this book Not Ready For Publication?
On 28 Mar 2010, at 22:24, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 09:05:01PM +0100, Michael Everson wrote:
>> I am sure that my foreword would begin "This book does not use standard Lojban orthography."
>
> If that was expanded into a paragraph, with an appropriate level of "If you use this sort of orthography, people will yell at you" sort of warning, the whole thing would bother me slightly less.
That would be the first sentence of a paragraph about the orthography and typography, yes. The reader would be warned that such conventions are not at present the norm amongst users of the language, etc.
On 28 Mar 2010, at 23:44, Jonathan Jones wrote:
>> Fair enough. Does that mean you wouldn't buy such a book if it were in Tengwar?
>
> That depends. Is it using Lojban's conventions or the conventions of English? If it's using Lojban conventions, yes. If it's using the same "seriously non-Lojban-standard typographic conventions" as it would were it using the Latin script, then no.
Well, Tengwar is caseless so there's no argument.
My intention is to use standard Latin-script typographic conventions, and these differ in some particulars from those used standardly by Lojban.
> You want to use Gothic letters and what-not, fine. You want to use special fonts, fine. Just don't mess with the standard Lojban typographic conventions and we've got no problems.
Except that the book is then a whole mess of lower-case letters with no punctuation.
> (What do you call a drop-cap that isn't a capital letter?)
A drop-cap.
Michael Everson
> I think the only place caps are used in the translation is in:
>
> lu la'e di'u krinu le nu zo CILRE cmene i jdika le ka temci kei lo cacra be li ba'e CI ca ro djedi be li ba'e RE li'u
>
> Italics is probably a much better idea than caps for that.
I'd agree there. (That's near the end of Chapter IX.)
> But I think the more interesting typographical question for Alice is not so much the use of capitals, but how to mark dialogue/quotes. I find lu"..."li'u quite hideous. I much prefer «lu ... li'u», which I think is what the ju'i lobypli used to use.
Well, I would certainly use guillemets and not comma-quotation marks because of the very common use of apostrophe as a letter throughout the text.
On 29 Mar 2010, at 03:57, Leo Molas wrote:
> As you said, there are many alternatives for the actual alphabet, and many discussions about orthography alternatives. However, the way we use it commonly is the way you'll read it in the IRC or in the books.
I'm aware of that.
> There might be better ways to write lojban, and you may writing it better than us, but the way we write it's the way we like to read it. (I re-wrote that sentence to not be *that* tautological).
I understand what you mean.
> Of course, the way we write it might be modified for good, but that should be done by the community, more specifically by the LLG (since it's an ex-cathedra language and all that stuff).
>
> You can, of course, publish your book the way you want. The problem will be that that will not be written lojban. It could be another isomorphism from some writings to lojban, but not what's known as written lojban.
As John has pointed out, Tengwar and Cyrillic orthographies differ from standard Lojban orthography, so this variation is just another.
> For example, I could write a book in English, but I change all characters 'a' with 'u', and all 'u' with '#' (saying it's because it's more beautiful or readable).
This is not analogous to what I am interested in doing.
> It would be a pain in the ass for all the English speakers, and, assuming it's actually better, is not going to
> really help anyone, since new speakers will be confused.
The analogue would be to publish a book in English with all its punctuation removed and with all capital letters converted to small letters.
> And about this last point, if anyone get who doesn't speak lojban, and is interested, he or she will be confused when he start learning lojban. I think this would be the worst part.
Actually I personally have never made any headway in understanding how Lojban worked before I tried to parse it with punctuation.
> You claim that "centuries of Latin typographic practice have evolved because those practices are *useful* to readers", well, that's assuming that they actually evolved.
Of course they did. See
Parkes, M. B. 1992. Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West.
Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07941-8
> It's not true until it's proved.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#History
> Take the natural languages, for example. They evolved for centuries, as well as their written versions, but they have so many problems, that led us to develop a language trying to prevent all this faults.
Punctuation and capitalization is mark-up. It *adds* information. So long as it is used judiciously, I cannot see how it might be related to the kind of "fault" to which you refer.
On 29 Mar 2010, at 05:44, John Cowan wrote:
> Robin Lee Powell scripsit:
>
>> "capitalize proper names because that's how English does it" most *certainly* does not.
>
> Not just English, but essentially *every* language written in Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic, which amounts to a huge fraction of all the written languages on the planet. Also, FWIW, Loglan., which originally used
> upper/lower case as Lojban does.
I found this, which is pretty cool: http://www.loglan.org/Texts/la-mioskun.html
Michael
Pierre Abbat
> Well, then you're going to get a very large number of paragraphs or
> sentences beginning ".i Lu" and I don't really see how that's better than
> "I lu".
How about this then?:
.i lu« .Uo, sei la .alis. pensi, mi ba lo nu farlu tai ti
mu'omi'e .pier.
--
Jews use a lunisolar calendar; Muslims use a solely lunar calendar.
Jorge Llambías
<michael...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29 Mar 2010, at 01:54, Jorge Llambías wrote:
>
>> I don't think the translation has many of those though. Maybe one
>> (intentional) grammatical error, though I don't now remember exactly
>> where.
>
> Curiouser and curiouser" is the intentional error that comes to mind.
>
> 'Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).
>
> i lu cizra je za’uzra sei la alis krixa to abu tai se spaji ja’e le nu ze’a tolmorji le nu ta’i makau tavla bau le drani lojbo toi.
The Lojban is grammatical though, it just uses a fu'ivla that looks
patterned like ci-zra, za'u-zra, which is not really a meaningful
Lojban pattern. (I wouldn't say the English is quite ungrammatical
either.)
I think the intentionally ungrammatical bit I was thinking of is this:
'I quite agree with you,' said the Duchess; 'and the moral of that
is—"Be what you would seem to be"—or if you'd like it put more
simply—"Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might
appear to others that what you were or might have been was not
otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be
otherwise."'
i lu mi do ja'asai tugni sei le noltroni'u cu cusku i la'e di'u
madni'i la'e lu ko ckaji le se simlu be do li'u i va'i sa'u lu ko
noroi se xanri le nu do na ckaji na'eboda poi do simlu fi lei drata fe
le ka de poi do ca'a ja nu'o ckaji ke'a na drata di poi do simlu ke'a
lei drata lo drata li'u li'u
I've no idea whether the English is grammatical, but I think the Lojban is.
Jorge Llambías
<michael...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 28 Mar 2010, at 15:14, Jorge Llambías wrote:
>
>> Personally, I like to reserve capital letters for letter names, so "A" instead of "abu", "B" instead of "by", and so on, just like "1" can stand for "pa", "2" for "re" and so on. It would be interesting to see how the Alice text looks with that convention, given the use of letter names as pronouns,
>
> Well, the letters have names; I would assume that By, Ly, Fy, Sy, Ny would do as well as Ogham's Beith, Luis, Fearn, Sail, Nion.
By, Ly, Fy, Sy, Ny presents no real advantage over by, ly, fy, sy, ny,
just as Pa, Re, Ci, Vo, Mu, would present no real advantage over pa,
re, ci, vo, mu. The idea of using B, L, F, S, N is the same as for
using 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. (And it's also quite standard in other languages,
after all we write "BPFK", not "Bee Pee Eff Kay".)
> On 28 Mar 2010, at 22:17, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
>>
>> Going through it *specifically* for that purpose has been on my to-do list since it was published. The main reason I haven't done it yet is that the BPFK needs to finish before I will even *know* what in xorban and what isn't.
>
> I ask again: is this a show-stopper? Is the language in this book Not Ready For Publication?
The only significant change I expect I would make today is replace all
LE gadri with "lo", but not making that change doesn't really make the
language as used wrong. Also, I notice that some cmavo are written
without a space between them, whereas today I would write the space.
Not a big deal, but you may want to adjust that. Spaces between cmavo
have always been optional, and the custom has varied with time, with
the tendency being towards preferring the spaced out forms.
Other than that, there's always room for improvement in any
translation, but on the whole I would say it is ready.
Jonathan Jones
mu'o mi'e xorxes
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Jonathan Jones
> You want to use Gothic letters and what-not, fine. You want to use special fonts, fine. Just don't mess with the standard Lojban typographic conventions and we've got no problems.Except that the book is then a whole mess of lower-case letters with no punctuation.
A drop-cap.
> (What do you call a drop-cap that isn't a capital letter?)
Michael Everson
> I believe this practice would be enough to distinguish most cases of {lu...li'u} without the need for any marks.
It would not work in narrative with nested quotation marks where you wish to retain paragraphing.
I certainly do not want to turn Alice in to the King James Bible where every verse begins a new paragraph.
Michael
Jonathan Jones
On 29 Mar 2010, at 15:16, Jonathan Jones wrote:It would not work in narrative with nested quotation marks where you wish to retain paragraphing.
> I believe this practice would be enough to distinguish most cases of {lu...li'u} without the need for any marks.
I certainly do not want to turn Alice in to the King James Bible where every verse begins a new paragraph.
Michael
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Michael Everson
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 2:58 AM, Michael Everson <michael...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> You want to use Gothic letters and what-not, fine. You want to use special fonts, fine. Just don't mess with the standard Lojban typographic conventions and we've got no problems.
>>
>> Except that the book is then a whole mess of lower-case letters with no punctuation.
>
> Lojban is written in lower-case letters with no punctuation. I don't see a problem.
OK. Fine. My goal is to treat Lojban not like an oddball, but as a full citizen of the community of languages which enjoy fine Latin typography. Perhaps you do not see this as an interesting or valuable goal, but it is nevertheless the goal which I have.
In my view, just pouring a whole mess of lower-case letters with no punctuation into my Alice template would not result in "fine Latin typography".
Michael
Jonathan Jones
On 29 Mar 2010, at 15:31, Jonathan Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 2:58 AM, Michael Everson <michael...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> You want to use Gothic letters and what-not, fine. You want to use special fonts, fine. Just don't mess with the standard Lojban typographic conventions and we've got no problems.OK. Fine. My goal is to treat Lojban not like an oddball, but as a full citizen of the community of languages which enjoy fine Latin typography. Perhaps you do not see this as an interesting or valuable goal, but it is nevertheless the goal which I have.
>>
>> Except that the book is then a whole mess of lower-case letters with no punctuation.
>
> Lojban is written in lower-case letters with no punctuation. I don't see a problem.
In my view, just pouring a whole mess of lower-case letters with no punctuation into my Alice template would not result in "fine Latin typography".
Michael
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Jonathan Jones
On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 8:55 AM, Michael Everson <michael...@gmail.com> wrote:On 29 Mar 2010, at 15:31, Jonathan Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 2:58 AM, Michael Everson <michael...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> You want to use Gothic letters and what-not, fine. You want to use special fonts, fine. Just don't mess with the standard Lojban typographic conventions and we've got no problems.OK. Fine. My goal is to treat Lojban not like an oddball, but as a full citizen of the community of languages which enjoy fine Latin typography. Perhaps you do not see this as an interesting or valuable goal, but it is nevertheless the goal which I have.
>>
>> Except that the book is then a whole mess of lower-case letters with no punctuation.
>
> Lojban is written in lower-case letters with no punctuation. I don't see a problem.
I don't see Lojban as being a member of the community of languages that use Latin typography. I don't see Lojban written in Cyrillic script as a member of the community of languages that use Cyrillic typography. I don't see Lojban written in Tengwar script as being a member of the community of languages that use Tengwar typography.I see Lojban as being of member of the community of languages that use Lojban typography, and happens to use Latin characters as it's official orthography. I see Lojban typography (, and bny extension, Loglan typography,) as cousin to the various Asain typographies, which do not have punctuation marks, like Lojban, do not need spaces, like Lojban, have words for what most languages use vocal tones and/or word order to indicate, like Lojban. I do not presume to say the Lojban is the same as Asian languages, I merely point out that Lojban has more similarities, in these matters, with the Asian languages, than with the European ones.In my view, just pouring a whole mess of lower-case letters with no punctuation into my Alice template would not result in "fine Latin typography".Neither do I. I, unlike you, consider that a good thing. I don't want Lojban written with "fine Latin typography".
Michael
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mu'o mi'e .aionys.
.i.a'o.e'e ko klama le bende pe denpa bu
Jorge Llambías
>
> How about this then?:
>
> .i lu« .Uo, sei la .alis. pensi, mi ba lo nu farlu tai ti
I understand your logic for lu«, but I still think «lu looks better,
so that the guillemets enclose a full sumti instead of a grammatical
non-structure. I could maybe live with lu «, but no space between lu
and « looks bad.
It's interesting that you capitalize the second letter of ".uo" rather
than the first. (In my view of things "uo" doesn't have an initial
glottal stop, but the comment would still apply to ".ei", which does.)
The commas... acceptable, but I like dashes there more.
Minimiscience
> To the unfocused eye, Lojban is no different from Basque in its
> non-Indo-Europeanism. ;-)
Good! Almost the entire point of Lojban and Loglan is to create a language
unlike any natural one and see what happens. Trying to make Lojban more like
widely-spoken languages defeats the whole point of attempting to isolate a
Sapir-Whorf effect or whatever it is we're supposed to be doing. Differences
in orthography force learners to think about the language more and, hopefully,
improve the way they think in general.
mu'omi'e .kamymecraijun.
--
() me la .asycy'i'ic. dasri nungazdau fi loi me la xytymylyl. samxa'a
/\ di'o la'o jy. www.asciiribbon.org .jy. fi loi posysivni datnytai minxa'a
Adam D. Lopresto
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 5:25 AM, Michael Everson
> <michael...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 'Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).
>>
>> i lu cizra je za�uzra sei la alis krixa to abu tai se spaji ja�e le nu ze�a tolmorji le nu ta�i makau tavla bau le drani lojbo toi.
>
> The Lojban is grammatical though, it just uses a fu'ivla that looks
> patterned like ci-zra, za'u-zra, which is not really a meaningful
> Lojban pattern. (I wouldn't say the English is quite ungrammatical
> either.)
Incidentally, I would suggest that {ci'izra} is better than {za'uzra} there.
-ci'i- being a rafsi for {cinri}, and {ci'i} being the number infinity
(contrasting with {ci} being 3), it seems to work on several levels at once.
--
Adam Lopresto
http://cec.wustl.edu/~adam/
I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it.
John E Clifford
As for the "changes" he is making in "Lojban typography", they fall well within the range of past approaches and have the rather clear advantage of making texts more easily readable (although ease has never been a long LoCCan suit). If newbies end up using them, then rejoice in the newbies and lead them by local example back to the true shining path (or, possibly change to that way of doing tjings yourself). Don't jump all over them for total trivia and watch them fade away.
On a non-trivial note, I see xorxes proposing to do away with all 'le' in laAlis. 'le' was one of JCB's really clever inventions, a thing of wide genuine use. Even in its present rather attenuated form, it is still valuable. To replace it by 'lo', whatever that may be nowadays, would degade the language severely (the o0pposite replacement might be an improvement however -- at least we would know what we had).
Leo Molas
>
>
> Michael
>
> --
> --
> mu'o mi'e .aionys.
>
> .i.a'o.e'e ko klama le bende pe denpa bu
>
I think this is a good point in all of this. Lojban is not written in
Latin typography; Lojban has a typogrphy that uses Latin a part of its
alphabet and a part of its punctuation, using it in another way. Lojban
uses this alphabet, to be compatible with everyone's keyboard; not with
Latin typography.
mu'omi'e .leos.
Jonathan Jones
ty·pog·ra·phy
rəfi/ 
Show Spelled[tahy-pog-ruh-fee] Show IPA rəfi/ Show Spelled[awr-thog-ruh-fee] Show IPA mu'omi'e .leos.
--
My lojban journal: http://learninglojban.wordpress.com
My personal blog: http://leomolas.tumblr.com
A. PIEKARSKI
>
> In the joy of contributing further to the going-on-60 year history of LoCCan
> typography, y'all seem to have missed the basic point: someone is offering
> to publish a work in Lojban on a real press for a real public, something that
> comes to very few conlangs. Jump at the opportunity, for goodness
> sakes!
As for the "changes" he is making in "Lojban typography", they
> fall well within the range of past approaches and have the rather clear
> advantage of making texts more easily readable (although ease has never been a
> long LoCCan suit). If newbies end up using them, then rejoice in the
> newbies and lead them by local example back to the true shining path (or,
> possibly change to that way of doing tjings yourself). Don't jump all over
> them for total trivia and watch them fade away.
As a recent (maybe current) newbie, (perhaps you've forgotten what being
one was like), I would say that the last thing I need is the confusion that would result
from having the only truly published work in Lojban printed in a modified or
alternative orthography.
mu'o mi'e .totus.
Jorge Llambías
>>>
>>> 'Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice
>>>
>
> Incidentally, I would suggest that {ci'izra} is better than {za'uzra} there.
> -ci'i- being a rafsi for {cinri}, and {ci'i} being the number infinity
> (contrasting with {ci} being 3), it seems to work on several levels at once.
I was going to say that someone else had suggested that before, but it
turns out it was you:
http://groups.google.com/group/lojban/browse_frm/thread/833dcf7f18863966
Yes, I would be happy with "ci'izra" too. I don't have a master copy
where to make such changes though.
Michael Everson
>> OK. Fine. My goal is to treat Lojban not like an oddball, but as a full citizen of the community of languages which enjoy fine Latin typography. Perhaps you do not see this as an interesting or valuable goal, but it is nevertheless the goal which I have.
>
> I don't see Lojban as being a member of the community of languages that use Latin typography.
> I don't see Lojban written in Cyrillic script as a member of the community of languages that use Cyrillic typography.
> I don't see Lojban written in Tengwar script as being a member of the community of languages that use Tengwar typography.
OK, this is, erm, really illogical, if I dare use such a word before people doubtless better at logic than I am.
I don't follow this double-talk really. Latin typography is an attribute of the Latin script.
> I see Lojban as being of member of the community of languages that use Lojban typography, and happens to use Latin characters as it's official orthography. I see Lojban typography (, and bny extension, Loglan typography,) as cousin to the various Asain typographies, which do not have punctuation marks, like Lojban, do not need spaces, like Lojban, have words for what most languages use vocal tones and/or word order to indicate, like Lojban.
Yeah, well, sure, except that lots of people are perfectly happy to sanction the use of punctuation marks with Lojban, so at the least not everyone shares your peculiar notions about what "orthography" and "typography" are. I say that advisedly, because you're not using the terms as anyone else does. Indeed it sounds like special pleading to avoid having to see Lojban written with case or punctuation.
> I do not presume to say the Lojban is the same as Asian languages, I merely point out that Lojban has more similarities, in these matters, with the Asian languages, than with the European ones.
Scripts have typography. Languages have orthography.
Latin is not Burmese or Thai or Hiragana.
>> In my view, just pouring a whole mess of lower-case letters with no punctuation into my Alice template would not result in "fine Latin typography".
>
> Neither do I. I, unlike you, consider that a good thing. I don't want Lojban written with "fine Latin typography".
OK. I'm sorry I won't satisfy your wish, because it is at odds with my goal.
Michael
Michael Everson
> To clarify: I want Lojban written with fine Lojban typography.
It's currently written without any typography at all, other than "font".
Michael
Jonathan Jones
On 29 Mar 2010, at 16:10, Jonathan Jones wrote:OK, this is, erm, really illogical, if I dare use such a word before people doubtless better at logic than I am.
>> OK. Fine. My goal is to treat Lojban not like an oddball, but as a full citizen of the community of languages which enjoy fine Latin typography. Perhaps you do not see this as an interesting or valuable goal, but it is nevertheless the goal which I have.
>
> I don't see Lojban as being a member of the community of languages that use Latin typography.
> I don't see Lojban written in Cyrillic script as a member of the community of languages that use Cyrillic typography.
> I don't see Lojban written in Tengwar script as being a member of the community of languages that use Tengwar typography.
I don't follow this double-talk really. Latin typography is an attribute of the Latin script.
Yeah, well, sure, except that lots of people are perfectly happy to sanction the use of punctuation marks with Lojban, so at the least not everyone shares your peculiar notions about what "orthography" and "typography" are. I say that advisedly, because you're not using the terms as anyone else does. Indeed it sounds like special pleading to avoid having to see Lojban written with case or punctuation.
> I see Lojban as being of member of the community of languages that use Lojban typography, and happens to use Latin characters as it's official orthography. I see Lojban typography (, and bny extension, Loglan typography,) as cousin to the various Asain typographies, which do not have punctuation marks, like Lojban, do not need spaces, like Lojban, have words for what most languages use vocal tones and/or word order to indicate, like Lojban.
> I do not presume to say the Lojban is the same as Asian languages, I merely point out that Lojban has more similarities, in these matters, with the Asian languages, than with the European ones.Scripts have typography. Languages have orthography.
Latin is not Burmese or Thai or Hiragana.
OK. I'm sorry I won't satisfy your wish, because it is at odds with my goal.
>> In my view, just pouring a whole mess of lower-case letters with no punctuation into my Alice template would not result in "fine Latin typography".
>
> Neither do I. I, unlike you, consider that a good thing. I don't want Lojban written with "fine Latin typography".
Michael
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Jonathan Jones
Michael
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Michael Everson
> de'i li 29 pi'e 03 pi'e 2010 la'o fy. Michael Everson .fy. cusku zoi skamyxatra.
>> To the unfocused eye, Lojban is no different from Basque in its
>> non-Indo-Europeanism. ;-)
>
> Good! Almost the entire point of Lojban and Loglan is to create a language unlike any natural one and see what happens.
My point was that, non-Indo-European as it is, Basque still enjoys the richness of Latin typographic conventions.
> Trying to make Lojban more like widely-spoken languages defeats the whole point of attempting to isolate a Sapir-Whorf effect or whatever it is we're supposed to be doing.
The Sapir-Whorf hyphothesis has nothing **whatsoever** with writing. English can be written in Latin letters, Greek letters, Runes, Verdurian, Shavian, Deseret or IPA, and it makes no difference at all in terms of what Sapir-Whorf is about.
> Differences in orthography force learners to think about the language more and, hopefully, improve the way they think in general.
Well, as an expert in writing systems, I think that's a pretty baseless assertion. Reading English in Deseret or Shavian does not make you think about English differently.
I don't mean to be grumpy about it, but that's really just nonsense. (Quite apart from Alice.)
Michael
Michael Everson
>>> In my view, just pouring a whole mess of lower-case letters with no punctuation into my Alice template would not result in "fine Latin typography".
>>
>> Neither do I. I, unlike you, consider that a good thing. I don't
>> /want/ Lojban written with "fine Latin typography".
>
> I think this is a good point in all of this. Lojban is not written in Latin typography;
Standard Lojban orthography makes use of the Latin script.
The Latin script is possessed of a long tradition of typographic conventions.
These two things are distinct. You cannot say that a language is "written in a typography". That makes no sense.
> Lojban has a typogrphy that uses Latin a part of its alphabet and a part of its punctuation, using it in another way. Lojban uses this alphabet, to be compatible with everyone's keyboard; not with Latin typography.
With all due respect, capital letters and punctuation like , . ; : ' " « » ( ) [ ] { } are available with everybody's keyboard.
Loglan was devised in 1955 when there were only typewriters (unless you could afford a Pegasus or something), and modulo « » on French typewriters all of those characters were available then, too.
Michael
Luke Bergen
Jonathan Jones
On 29 Mar 2010, at 17:27, Leo Molas wrote:
>>> In my view, just pouring a whole mess of lower-case letters with no punctuation into my Alice template would not result in "fine Latin typography".
>>
>> Neither do I. I, unlike you, consider that a good thing. I don't
>> /want/ Lojban written with "fine Latin typography".
>> I think this is a good point in all of this. Lojban is not written in Latin typography;Standard Lojban orthography makes use of the Latin script.
The Latin script is possessed of a long tradition of typographic conventions.
These two things are distinct. You cannot say that a language is "written in a typography". That makes no sense.
With all due respect, capital letters and punctuation like , . ; : ' " « » ( ) [ ] { } are available with everybody's keyboard.
> Lojban has a typogrphy that uses Latin a part of its alphabet and a part of its punctuation, using it in another way. Lojban uses this alphabet, to be compatible with everyone's keyboard; not with Latin typography.
Loglan was devised in 1955 when there were only typewriters (unless you could afford a Pegasus or something), and modulo « » on French typewriters all of those characters were available then, too.
Michael
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Michael Everson
> The thing is, typography and orthopgraphy are not the same thing.
Ah, I was behind in my reading. Thank you for
> Lojban uses the Latin orthography, but it does not use the Latin typography.
Well. What you mean is that writers who write Lojban use Latin, or Tengwar, or Cyrillic orthography. (Lojban itself is a language, and languages don't use anything.)
As for your second point, I think that what you mean is that the standard Lojban orthography tends to make use of the capitalization and punctuation common in Latin typography in a different way than other languages do.
Except of course that some people use acute vowels instead of capital vowels for anomalous stress, and some people use guillemets, and some people use question marks and exclamation marks. At least that's what people are saying. But those are variations of Latin typographic conventions used to write the language.
Michael.
Luke Bergen
Jonathan Jones
On 29 Mar 2010, at 18:06, Jonathan Jones wrote:Ah, I was behind in my reading. Thank you for
> The thing is, typography and orthopgraphy are not the same thing.
Well. What you mean is that writers who write Lojban use Latin, or Tengwar, or Cyrillic orthography. (Lojban itself is a language, and languages don't use anything.)
> Lojban uses the Latin orthography, but it does not use the Latin typography.
As for your second point, I think that what you mean is that the standard Lojban orthography tends to make use of the capitalization and punctuation common in Latin typography in a different way than other languages do.
Except of course that some people use acute vowels instead of capital vowels for anomalous stress,
and some people use guillemets,
and some people use question marks and exclamation marks.
At least that's what people are saying.
But those are variations of Latin typographic conventions used to write the language.
Michael.
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Jonathan Jones
Before you go further... your message gives the impression that it's common to see those things when it really is not at all. I don't think I've ever seen these non-standard forms, but again, I'm still fairly new.
On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 2:00 PM, Michael Everson <michael...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 29 Mar 2010, at 18:06, Jonathan Jones wrote:Ah, I was behind in my reading. Thank you for
> The thing is, typography and orthopgraphy are not the same thing.
Well. What you mean is that writers who write Lojban use Latin, or Tengwar, or Cyrillic orthography. (Lojban itself is a language, and languages don't use anything.)
> Lojban uses the Latin orthography, but it does not use the Latin typography.
As for your second point, I think that what you mean is that the standard Lojban orthography tends to make use of the capitalization and punctuation common in Latin typography in a different way than other languages do.
Except of course that some people use acute vowels instead of capital vowels for anomalous stress, and some people use guillemets, and some people use question marks and exclamation marks. At least that's what people are saying. But those are variations of Latin typographic conventions used to write the language.
Michael.
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Michael Everson
> Insofar as Lojban is concerned, {la.mari,án.} and {la.mari,An.} are the same thing. {la.mari,An.} is much more common, as "A" is easier to type. (On standard U.S. keyboard, for instance, "A" is <shift>+a, "á" is <alt>+<numpad 0,2,2,5>.)
That would be pretty old software. US International keyboards have shipped on the Windows platform for a very long time indeed. I use an Irish keyboard on the Mac OS, and for me, A is shift-a, and á is alt-a, The US keyboard on the Mac has alt-e + a for á. And has for years and years.
>> and some people use guillemets,
>
> I've never seen that used in actual writing.
Yes, well, I'm going to use them, and they're discussed on p. 67 of Nick and John's book.
>> and some people use question marks and exclamation marks.
>
> I've never seen that used in actual writing.
They're discussed on p. 67 of Nick and John's book.
>> At least that's what people are saying.
>
> No, people are saying they *can* be. Not that they *are*.
Well, fine. Then I *can* use them. :-)
>> But those are variations of Latin typographic conventions used to write the language.
>
> Those are non-standard conventions, yes.
They're discussed on p. 67 of Nick and John's book.
Michael
MorphemeAddict
Leo Molas
>> characters 'a' with 'u', and all 'u' with '#' (saying it's because
>> it's more beautiful or readable).
>
> This is not analogous to what I am interested in doing.
>
>> It would be a pain in the ass for all the English speakers, and,
>> assuming it's actually better, is not going to really help anyone,
>> since new speakers will be confused.
>
> The analogue would be to publish a book in English with all its
> punctuation removed and with all capital letters converted to small
> letters.
>
Nice analogy. As a English speaker, would you like a book like that
(given the publisher claims it's more beautiful or sylish...)?
>> And about this last point, if anyone get who doesn't speak lojban,
>> and is interested, he or she will be confused when he start
>> learning lojban. I think this would be the worst part.
>
> Actually I personally have never made any headway in understanding
> how Lojban worked before I tried to parse it with punctuation.
>
>
>> Take the natural languages, for example. They evolved for
>> centuries, as well as their written versions, but they have so many
>> problems, that led us to develop a language trying to prevent all
>> this faults.
>
> Punctuation and capitalization is mark-up. It *adds* information. So
> long as it is used judiciously, I cannot see how it might be related
> to the kind of "fault" to which you refer.
>
You're not only adding information, but also changing the way it's
commonly written.
mu'o mi'e .leos.
Luke Bergen
Michael
Christopher Doty
John Cowan
> In the joy of contributing further to the going-on-60 year history
> of LoCCan typography, y'all seem to have missed the basic point:
> someone is offering to publish a work in Lojban on a real press for a
> real public, something that comes to very few conlangs. Jump at the
> opportunity, for goodness sakes!
Amen.
And I'm signing off Lojban List again, because I find I can no longer keep the
three vows of the Lojban dedicate: bikeshed-painting, yak-shaving, and endless
repetition. You can find me on IRC, sometimes, or write me privately.
--
John Cowan co...@ccil.org http://ccil.org/~cowan
Consider the matter of Analytic Philosophy. Dennett and Bennett are well-known.
Dennett rarely or never cites Bennett, so Bennett rarely or never cites Dennett.
There is also one Dummett. By their works shall ye know them. However, just as
no trinities have fourth persons (Zeppo Marx notwithstanding), Bummett is hardly
known by his works. Indeed, Bummett does not exist. It is part of the function
of this and other e-mail messages, therefore, to do what they can to create him.
Jonathan Jones
On 29 Mar 2010, at 19:09, Jonathan Jones wrote:That would be pretty old software. US International keyboards have shipped on the Windows platform for a very long time indeed. I use an Irish keyboard on the Mac OS, and for me, A is shift-a, and á is alt-a, The US keyboard on the Mac has alt-e + a for á. And has for years and years.
> Insofar as Lojban is concerned, {la.mari,án.} and {la.mari,An.} are the same thing. {la.mari,An.} is much more common, as "A" is easier to type. (On standard U.S. keyboard, for instance, "A" is <shift>+a, "á" is <alt>+<numpad 0,2,2,5>.)
A U.S. International keyboard is not a U.S. Standard keyboard. IIRC, U.S. International keyboards have an "alt-gr" key for typing international characters where U.S. Standard keyboards have a right "alt" key.
Yes, well, I'm going to use them, and they're discussed on p. 67 of Nick and John's book.
>> and some people use guillemets,
>
> I've never seen that used in actual writing.
They're discussed on p. 67 of Nick and John's book.
>> and some people use question marks and exclamation marks.
>
> I've never seen that used in actual writing.
Well, fine. Then I *can* use them. :-)
>> At least that's what people are saying.
>
> No, people are saying they *can* be. Not that they *are*.
They're discussed on p. 67 of Nick and John's book.
>> But those are variations of Latin typographic conventions used to write the language.
>
> Those are non-standard conventions, yes.
Michael
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Jonathan Jones
Consider, for example, the PDF version of la .alis. In addition to everything else that is going on, there is no use of the periods to mark glottal stops, so .i becomes just i.
<snip>
Chris
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Christopher Doty
It seems a little type-o-centric to say "it uses latin characters, therefore, for some reasons or other, it should use the same typographic standards".
Luke Bergen
--
Jonathan Jones
Consistency with nearly everything else that has been written in lojban thus far?> what is gained by asserting that there should be no change?
Christopher Doty
Consistency with nearly everything else that has been written in lojban thus far?
Jorge Llambías
>
> On a non-trivial note, I see xorxes proposing to do away with all 'le' in laAlis. 'le' was one of JCB's really clever inventions, a thing of wide genuine use. Even in its present rather attenuated form, it is still valuable. To replace it by 'lo', whatever that may be nowadays, would degade the language severely (the o0pposite replacement might be an improvement however -- at least we would know what we had).
It's hard to see how, if "le" and "lo" are merged as one, pronouncing
the resulting form "le" could be an improvement while pronouncing it
"lo" would be a degradation.
The reason I prefer "lo nu" to the previously ubiquitous "le nu" is
that in many/most cases of "le nu" there was no intent to refer to a
specific event that the speaker had in mind, "lenu" was just the
automatic option for subordinate bridi, without any consideration of
specificity.
Michael Everson
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 11:46, Luke Bergen <lukea...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It seems a little type-o-centric to say "it uses latin characters, therefore, for some reasons or other, it should use the same typographic standards".
>
> But this isn't quite true. Lojban, with a couple of exceptions, uses Latin characters just like other languages that use Latin characters. "G" does not, for example, represent the sound [a].
Noooooooo, that's *orthography*.
> What Michael seems to be proposing is exactly the same thing--Lojban conventions for punctuation and capitalization should follow what is done for other languages which use the Latin script, in order to make it more accessible to people.
No, Michael is saying that he's going to set *this* Victorian book in the same style and to the same typographic standard as all his other editions of *this* Victorian book.
I have no idea what if any impact this will have on the users of Lojban. As such my project is, in addition to be part of a Carrollian collection, part of a dialogue with the LoCCan project.
> I am honestly kind of surprised to find this much debate in response to the idea that something be changed.
I have not proposed that the standard orthography, or standardly sanctioned options, be reviewed or revised. I don't necessarily oppose such a discussion, but I have not made a request for such a discussion to take place.
> Is there actually any reason to NOT make Lojban more accessible to people, except that people who are already proficient in the language don't like it?
Now, there's a good point.
> I don't mean that sarcastically; I missed the start of the conversation--what is gained by asserting that there should be no change?
Stability, and impenetrability.
:-)
Michael
Christopher Doty
Noooooooo, that's *orthography*.
Jonathan Jones
:-)
Michael
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Jonathan Jones
Chris
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Christopher Doty
Michael Turniansky
<michael...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Now, now. Conventions are devised by people. In the Latin script, certain conventions are used for most languages. Capitals at the beginning of sentences, full stops at the end, capitals for personal names. Sure, when Lojban was devised, other conventions were used. That does not mean that text in Lojban ceases to be Lojban if traditional Latin casing and punctuation conventions are used. After all, if Tengwar can be used, or Cyrillic, then why should there be some sort of "ban" on using "Victorian typographic conventions" for a book written in the nineteenth century? It's just a convention. You might not prefer it. You've stated that you've got preferences.
But as the Latin alphabet was adopted by each culture, they did make
modifications to it, to suit their individual needs. Or would you
insist that a French word that is supposed to have an accent grave use
an accent ague or circumflex, simply becuase it wasn't isomorphic with
a different language? Would you remove the upside-down question marks
and exclamations in Spanish? Would you change spellings because a j in
Spanish isn't the same sound as a j in French? Insist French drop «»
in favor of “” ? Insiit German use only capitals for proper nouns,
not all nouns, as they currently do? When used in lojban, Latin
alphabet has certain conventions. There is some flexibility, but the
limits of flexibility are strictly defined.
--Mike "gejyspa" Turniansky
Luke Bergen
Minimiscience
> I would buy any book written in Lojban (assuming it's well translated, or
> that it's original text), regardless of the capitalization. But if it did
> use capitalization, as in the example, I'd grumble about it every time I
> picked up the book.
>
> We don't have enough books in Lojban to be picky about how they look.
How's this for a compromise: Michael gets to publish *{la .alis.}* with
whatever typography he wants, and at the same time the LLG publishes *{la
.alis.}* with standard typography via lulu.com or some other vanity press. The
number of published Lojban books increases by two, Michael gets to publish it
as he likes, and the LLG combats his variant typography with a book that
newbies can point to or be pointed to. Or everyone tells me why this is a
horrible idea that should never be spoken of again.
mu'omi'e .kamymecraijun.
--
va'o lonu da'i noda va bartu kei ma pu va savru
Michael Everson
>> Wow, I guess I completely missed the point of this conversation and what Michael was saying--which seems to be that he's going to do this however he wants, never mind what anyone says, instead of trying to actually think about this and present a solution that could be adopted by people in the future. Is that a correct assessment?
>
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 13:03, Michael Everson <michael...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Noooooooo, that's *orthography*.
>
> I tried not to get involved in this, but.... I'm not sure why you're drawing the line here, and saying that "G/a" is orthography and other things, like capitalization, not.
Because you can have a text marked up with capitalization and punctuation, and you can strip out all the caps and puncts and the basic text is essentially the same.
Swgppina the letter a gnd g is gn orthoargphic trgnsformgtion, which is not the sgme thina.
Christopher Doty
--
John E Clifford
But don't let this opportunity go by by burying it under a mass of trivial objections, that have nothing to do with Lojban per se.
Michael Everson
> Yes, I realize they are not (exactly) the same thing, but "orthography," as commonly understood, is not devoid of typographic conventions
Orthography is the thing the spell-checker looks at.
The spell-checker ignores punctuation (typically, it ignores quotation marks regularly but will distinguish "can't" and "cant") and may or may not ignore capitalization depending on how it is set.
Michael
John E Clifford
--
Christopher Doty
John E Clifford
From: Christopher Doty <suomi...@gmail.com>
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Mon, March 29, 2010 4:23:05 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] la .alis.
Jorge Llambías
> If it is really true that the language has degenerated to the point that 'lo' and 'le' are merged as one,
It hasn't, and I didn't say it had. I said I would replace all
instances of "le" by "lo".
You said that would be a degradation, while replacing all instances of
"lo" by "le" might be an improvement.
I just don't see how ending up with only "le" could be an improvement
while ending up with only "lo" would be a degradation. It seems to me
that the final result would be identical.
> the replacing one by the other is indeed pointless. And, if it is true 'le nu' was regularly used improperly, the replacing it in most places by lo might be some improvement.
Yes, "nu", "ka", "du'u", indeed all NUs, were used practically
exclusively with "le", just look at any oldish text (say more than
five years).
> Unfortunately, that move does mean that we would go from something we has some idea about ('le nu') even if it did not strictly apply, to one we have no clear idea about at all ('lo nu' or 'lo' anything, for that matter).
Well, speaking for myself, I have a more clear idea about "lo" than about "le":
"lo" converts a selbri into a sumti. Nothing else.
"le" also converts a selbri into a sumti, but it does something else
that is hard to pinpoint exactly. It adds a notion of specificity or
definiteness. Of course I have some intuitions about what that means,
but trying to specify exactly what it means is hard, as anyone whose
native language does not have definite articles finds out when
learning one that does.
> Btw, I hope the first protasis is not true, that in the proliferation of picky details to fix earlier goofs, we have lost one of the big distinctions that was one of the things done right from almost the beginning.
"le" is still +specific, if that's what you mean.