Question

[Annie]

I found out that in Lojban, there's apparently no h. How is that so, when the apostrophe is practically the h?

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[Matt Arnold]

Annie,

Lojban has the aspiration sound, but not the "h" character. This is
because the sound of aspiration serves a special, restricted function
in Lojban, merely to separate vowels. By marking it with the
apostrophe, it will not be confused for a standard character. It
cannot serve in "th", "ph", "gh" or "zh" as "h" can in English.

-Eppcott

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[mudri]

Just to add something, 'h' is the upper case version of the apostrophe (both called {.y'y.}). This really only ever occurs in selma'o names, though it is very common in these.

It is called a "half letter" sometimes for various reasons. Matt explained how it only appears between vowels, and is unique in this respect (commas, if I remember correctly, can be used next to syllabic consonants - but that's unimportant). The apostrophe also has no effect on morphology: CVV and CV'V syllables behave identically (other than having different meanings). Finally, it is counted almost literally as half a letter in the lujvo scoring algorithm. "Something that acts as half a letter", I suppose someone thought, "should have 'half' a glyph, pe'a".

[Annie]

Are you saying that left-brace is sort of a letter? What do you mean by upper apostrophe, or whatever? 

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[mudri]

The curly braces are quotes for Lojban text within text of other languages. I'm not quite sure why they're used, but it's a kind of standard.

For upper case apostrophe, I'll give the example of the name of selma'o {KOhA} (again, braces are "quotes"). It is derrived from {ko'a}. So, as 'K' is capital 'k', 'h' is capital apostrophe.

[Annie]

Since it's not really a letter, why would you want to capitalize the apostrophe?

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[mudri]

Basically, so that it can be used in YACC. To appreciate that answer fully, you'd need to know some basic conventions used in context-free grammar notation.

[Devin Prater]

Um, how could you capitalize an apostrophe?

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[Annie]

Well, it looks like, so far, you just right an h, but I don't get it either. I've asked the same question.

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[Annie]

Oh, so you're saying I'm over my head right? What kind of basic conventions?

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[mudri]

Specifically, non-terminal symbols are written in all-capitals. This may make things clearer: http://epaperpress.com/lexandyacc/thy.html (though it may not).

[selpa'i]

There seems to be some confusion here about the apostrophe and capital
letters in Lojban.

Lojban does not use capital letters unless when you wish to mark a
stressed syllable, which is are written using capital letters. It's also
legal to only capitalize the vowel of that syllable.

For example, dunda might be written DUNda or dUnda, but this is not
required. (There are also some other systems in use, like placing
accents above the vowel instead)

Secondly, we've established already that instead of an h, Lojban uses
the apostrophe for reasons that have been given already. When writing
parsers for Lojban, in the program/code, you need to use names
internally that don't interfere with the syntax of the programming
language. Usually, apostrophes can't be used, so in this case, and
really only in this case, the apostrophe is replaced by an actual h. You
will never see this is actual Lojban text, so you don't even need to
worry about it.

h is the capitalized version of ' simply because ' denotes an h sound,
and so "h" is the most obvious choice for a capital version of this letter.

"mi'e la selpa'i" would be capitalized as "MIhE LA SELPAhI", in theory,
but again, this is not something that you need to do. It's just simply a
fact that ' and h are the lower and upper case versions of the same
letter. Many also prefer to keep the apostrophe even in words that are
entirely capitalized: "MI'E LA SELPA'I".

mi'e la selpa'i mu'o

--
doị mèlbi mlenì'u
.i do càtlu ki'u
ma fe la xàmpre ŭu
.i do tìnsa càrmi
gi'e sìrji se tàrmi
.i taị bo pu cìtka lo gràna ku


.

[Annie]

I'm confused. Apostrophe is a letter?

Sent from my iPod

[Jacob Errington]

Yes, the apostrophe is a letter in that it has a sound, namely the sound that an h would make. It only appears in very specific locations: between vowels. Due to its limited function, you can consider it like a second-class letter. 

As for selma'o names (selma'o means "grammatical class of a cmavo" and cmavo means "little word denoting structure") there is a convention that takes the most important or otherwise remarkable cmavo of that class and capitalizes it to form the selma'o name. 

Take for instance the class of cmavo that behave identically to {ui} (again, the curly braces here are used to quote lojban text, because using quotation marks might be mistaken for apostrophes, which as we are discussing, are also like letters). All the words that behave like {ui} are said to be in the class UI written in all caps. 

Now, what happens when the most remarkable cmavo contains an apostrophe? Well, there's the obvious solution of simply not capitalizing the apostrophe at all, but when the lojban parser was originally written, certain things in the code needed to be written in all caps and in the code it was not allowed to use apostrophes, so the lower-case h was chosen, because a lower-case letter among upper-case letters is somewhat like a second-class letter, which reflects the true nature of the apostrophe anyway.

All that being said, the letter h proper only ever appears in selma'o names, which never actually appear in Lojban text (discussing selma'o *in* lojban is done by other methods). Equally, the letter h can appear when writing in all caps, but there is again no real purpose to that. 

Well, to be honest, as selpa'i said, capital letters are used to designate stress, which can only be irregular in cmevla. For instance, in French, the word "Paris" is stressed on the last syllable, whereas in Lojban, standard stress is on the second-to-last syllable. To account for irregular stress in these borrowed names, Lojban lets you indicate where the irregular stress is by a multitude of methods. It used to be preferred to use capital letters for this, giving {.paRIS.}, but these days using diacritics such as accent marks is more advisable, giving {.parìs.}. If you have to borrow a name that has the h sound in an irregularly stressed syllable, then you could capitalize it according to the old way (remember, nowadays using accent marks is better). That would produce something like {.pahArosin.}, but that is pretty unusual. 

So in sum, capital letters have an *extremely* limited use in Lojban. In fact, there're essentially no more reasons to ever use capital letters when actually writing *in* lojban. When talking *about* lojban, it can be useful to talk about grammatical classes of those little words, in which case it's unavoidable to write things like KOhA to refer to the entire class of small grammar words that behave identically to the major element {ko'a}. Historically, remember that using the all-caps for that purpose arose out of a convention based on the old source code for the parser. Finally, the apostrophe is indeed a letter, because is it indeed pronounced, but it has a limited function as a vowel separator: it can only appear between vowels (words can't start with it, for example). 

.i mi'e la tsani mu'o

[Jonathan Jones]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 5:20 PM, mudri <jammya...@gmail.com> wrote:

The curly braces are quotes for Lojban text within text of other languages. I'm not quite sure why they're used, but it's a kind of standard.

I'm pretty sure it came about as a means of signalling that the enclosed text was in Lojban. There are some words, like {santa}, for instance, that are also words in English, and I'd bet other languages too, so "santa" isn't as clearly the Lojban word as {santa} is. As to why '{ }' in the first place, my guess is is that it's because '( )', '[ ]', and '< >' either already have a different use in English or doesn't look as 'cool'. (santa) [santa] <santa> {santa}.

 

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--
mu'o mi'e .aionys.

.i.e'ucai ko cmima lo pilno be denpa bu .i doi.luk. mi patfu do zo'o
(Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )

[Jonathan Jones]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 5:20 PM, mudri <jammya...@gmail.com> wrote:

The curly braces are quotes for Lojban text within text of other languages. I'm not quite sure why they're used, but it's a kind of standard.

For upper case apostrophe, I'll give the example of the name of selma'o {KOhA} (again, braces are "quotes"). It is derrived from {ko'a}. So, as 'K' is capital 'k', 'h' is capital apostrophe.

Actually, "KOhA" isn't Lojban. It's the English name for the group. 'h' was chosen because the computers that were being used at the time wouldn't allow using " ' ", and it kind of stuck. In Lojban, "KOhA" is {lo selma'o be ko'a}

 

On Saturday, 24 November 2012 00:14:36 UTC, Annie wrote:

Are you saying that left-brace is sort of a letter? What do you mean by upper apostrophe, or whatever? 

Sent from my iPod

On Nov 23, 2012, at 5:19 PM, mudri <jammya...@gmail.com> wrote:

Just to add something, 'h' is the upper case version of the apostrophe (both called {.y'y.}). This really only ever occurs in selma'o names, though it is very common in these.

It is called a "half letter" sometimes for various reasons. Matt explained how it only appears between vowels, and is unique in this respect (commas, if I remember correctly, can be used next to syllabic consonants - but that's unimportant). The apostrophe also has no effect on morphology: CVV and CV'V syllables behave identically (other than having different meanings). Finally, it is counted almost literally as half a letter in the lujvo scoring algorithm. "Something that acts as half a letter", I suppose someone thought, "should have 'half' a glyph, pe'a".

On Sunday, 18 November 2012 22:50:10 UTC, Annie wrote:

I found out that in Lojban, there's apparently no h. How is that so, when the apostrophe is practically the h?

Sent from my iPod

*** This Email was sent by a student at School for the Blind.

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[Jonathan Jones]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 2:33 AM, Jonathan Jones <eye...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 5:20 PM, mudri <jammya...@gmail.com> wrote:

The curly braces are quotes for Lojban text within text of other languages. I'm not quite sure why they're used, but it's a kind of standard.

For upper case apostrophe, I'll give the example of the name of selma'o {KOhA} (again, braces are "quotes"). It is derrived from {ko'a}. So, as 'K' is capital 'k', 'h' is capital apostrophe.

Actually, "KOhA" isn't Lojban. It's the English name for the group. 'h' was chosen because the computers that were being used at the time wouldn't allow using " ' ", and it kind of stuck. In Lojban, "KOhA" is {lo selma'o be ko'a}*

*Sorry, {lo cmavo be ko'a} (or {lo selma'o be fe ko'a}, but that one's ugly.)

[Jonathan Jones]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 2:37 AM, Jonathan Jones <eye...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 2:33 AM, Jonathan Jones <eye...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 5:20 PM, mudri <jammya...@gmail.com> wrote:

The curly braces are quotes for Lojban text within text of other languages. I'm not quite sure why they're used, but it's a kind of standard.

For upper case apostrophe, I'll give the example of the name of selma'o {KOhA} (again, braces are "quotes"). It is derrived from {ko'a}. So, as 'K' is capital 'k', 'h' is capital apostrophe.

Actually, "KOhA" isn't Lojban. It's the English name for the group. 'h' was chosen because the computers that were being used at the time wouldn't allow using " ' ", and it kind of stuck. In Lojban, "KOhA" is {lo selma'o be ko'a}*

*Sorry, {lo cmavo be ko'a} (or {lo selma'o be fe ko'a}, but that one's ugly.)

... fa 

[ianek]

On 24 Lis, 10:39, Jonathan Jones <eyeo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 2:37 AM, Jonathan Jones <eyeo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 2:33 AM, Jonathan Jones <eyeo...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> >> On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 5:20 PM, mudri <jammyatja...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >>> The curly braces are quotes for Lojban text within text of other
> >>> languages. I'm not quite sure why they're used, but it's a kind of standard.
>
> >>> For upper case apostrophe, I'll give the example of the name of selma'o
> >>> {KOhA} (again, braces are "quotes"). It is derrived from {ko'a}. So, as 'K'
> >>> is capital 'k', 'h' is capital apostrophe.
>
> >> Actually, "KOhA" isn't Lojban. It's the English name for the group. 'h'
> >> was chosen because the computers that were being used at the time wouldn't
> >> allow using " ' ", and it kind of stuck. In Lojban, "KOhA" is {lo selma'o
> >> be ko'a}*
>
> > *Sorry, {lo cmavo be ko'a} (or {lo selma'o be fe ko'a}, but that one's
> > ugly.)
>
> ... fa

Why? First, I'd use a {zo} to quote {ko'a} (we want to refer to a
word). Second, why {lo selma'o be zo ko'a} is wrong? Third, why {lo
cmavo be zo ko'a} is better? cmavo2 is a selma'o, zo ko'a is a cmavo,
not a selma'o. KOhA is a selma'o, lo cmavo is obviously a cmavo.

mu'o mi'e ianek

>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >>> On Saturday, 24 November 2012 00:14:36 UTC, Annie wrote:
>
> >>>> Are you saying that left-brace is sort of a letter? What do you mean by
> >>>> upper apostrophe, or whatever?
>
> >>>> Sent from my iPod
>
> >>>> On Nov 23, 2012, at 5:19 PM, mudri <jammya...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >>>> Just to add something, 'h' is the upper case version of the apostrophe
> >>>> (both called {.y'y.}). This really only ever occurs in selma'o names,
> >>>> though it is very common in these.
>
> >>>> It is called a "half letter" sometimes for various reasons. Matt
> >>>> explained how it only appears between vowels, and is unique in this respect
> >>>> (commas, if I remember correctly, can be used next to syllabic consonants -
> >>>> but that's unimportant). The apostrophe also has no effect on morphology:
> >>>> CVV and CV'V syllables behave identically (other than having different
> >>>> meanings). Finally, it is counted almost literally as half a letter in the
> >>>> lujvo scoring algorithm. "Something that acts as half a letter", I suppose
> >>>> someone thought, "should have 'half' a glyph, pe'a".
>
> >>>> On Sunday, 18 November 2012 22:50:10 UTC, Annie wrote:
>
> >>>>> I found out that in Lojban, there's apparently no h. How is that so,
> >>>>> when the apostrophe is practically the h?
>
> >>>>> Sent from my iPod
>
> >>>>> *** This Email was sent by a student at School for the Blind.
>
> >>>>  --
> >>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> >>>> Groups "Lojban Beginners" group.

> >>>> To view this discussion on the web visithttps://groups.google.com/d/**
> >>>> msg/lojban-beginners/-/-**zJpIwnUk9EJ<https://groups.google.com/d/msg/lojban-beginners/-/-zJpIwnUk9EJ>
> >>>> .
> >>>> To post to this group, send email to lojban-b...@googlegroups.**com.
> >>>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban-beginne...@**
> >>>> googlegroups.com.
>
> >>>> For more options, visit this group athttp://groups.google.com/**
> >>>> group/lojban-beginners?hl=en<http://groups.google.com/group/lojban-beginners?hl=en>
> >>>> .

[Jonathan Jones]

{ma'oi ko'a}, and non-experimental, {lo selmao be me'e zo ko'a}. Ignore all my previous.

[Jacob Errington]

{lo selma'o be zo ko'a} is undoubtedly the most common and most precise non-experimental way to say it, but I highly doubt that {ma'oi} will remain experimental.

[Annie]

If braces are quotes, then what is so complicating about their use?

Sent from my iPod

[James Wood]

I assume you are talking about how "KOhA" shouldn't be in braces (the mistake I made). The problem is that the text inside the braces should be in Lojban. However, those capitalised selma'o names are not part of correct Lojban. They are used when talking about Lojban in a language other than Lojban. It's a simple rule, but I fear that it's been made to seem more complicated than it is.

[Annie]

How can I know if a name is a selma'o name or not? I hope I spelled that correctly.

Sent from my iPod

[Devin Prater]

What's a selma'o? I saw that in the Lojban dictionary app on my iPod.

Sent from my iPod with gmail

[Annie]

A selma'o is a word that basically, if I'm understanding correctly, means "grammatical".

Sent from my iPod

[Pierre Abbat]

On Friday, November 23, 2012 15:19:58 mudri wrote:
> Just to add something, 'h' is the upper case version of the apostrophe
> (both called {.y'y.}). This really only ever occurs in selma'o names,
> though it is very common in these.

As others have explained, 'h' is used in a computer language for formal
grammars. The letter 'h' is called {y'ybu} in Lojban; the apostrophe is called
{y'y}. If I were writing Lojban that contains apostrophes in all capitals, I'd
leave the apostrophes alone: {NI'O LE BI'U CMALU BLOTI ZE'EPU NAKU XE KLAMA}.

Pierre
--
gau do li'i co'e kei do

[Devin Prater]

ah, OK, that makes since.

Sent from my iPod with gmail

[Jonathan Jones]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Devin Prater <r.d.t....@gmail.com> wrote:

What's a selma'o? I saw that in the Lojban dictionary app on my iPod.

A selma'o is a group of cmavo that have the same grammatical use. The word "selma'o" is a lujvo made from the rafsi for the words {se} (sel) and {cmavo} (ma'o). The Lojban definition of cmavo is "x₁ is a structure word of grammatical class x₂, with meaning/function x₃ in usage (language) x₄.", the {se} switches the x₁ and x₂, making the definition of selma'o "x₁ is a grammatical class of structure word x₂, with meaning/function x₃ in usage (language) x₄."

For example, all cmavo in UI are "free modifiers" that can be found anywhere in a Lojban bridi (except in the middle of another word) and "attach" themselves to the immediately preceding word:

{.i.ia mi.io nelci.ui lo plise.ua}

Which means, "I like apples.", and also says that I respect myself, am happy about liking, am discovering apples, and believe the statement.

Note: the words in bold are only bold to show which words are of selma'o UI. Lojban does not use boldface.