Jboske: for technical discussion of the language Lojban; I like the sound of that!
A
phonemic alphabet was chosen for Lojban. Everyone seems well pleased
with this; such a level of isomorphism between speech and text is much
more appealing than English.
Common usage of Lojban orthography has spaces to distinguish
words from one another. In speech, spaces are not articulated, in general. The rules for speech have another mechanism for
distinguishing words from one another; apart from requiring knowledge
of the vocabulary, syllabic stress is the main tool in determining
where one word ends and another begins.
The orthography has a mechanism for expressing stress, too. This feature is not *required* for words which have stress on the penultimate syllable, but it's not required that it *not* be used on those words. Consistent use of this feature makes the space redundant; word boundaries are just
as well-defined as in speech. To my knowledge, the CLL does not state
that spaces are the required, and only permissable, mechanism for seperating words in text.
The technical topics of immediate interest, then, are:
First, have I made any technical errors above?
Are
there any rules against spaceless Lojban text? Are there any technical
objections? Does it generate any inconsistency, or other technically
undesirable effects?
Some of the technical points going *for* it are:
Improved isomorphism between spoken and written Lojban
More consistent usage of the "stress *here*" feature of written Lojban
There are personal topics of interest related to the above,
too, but I think many will agree this is not the place, and definitely
not the time, for them. So, technical commentaries welcome.
mi'e .xius.
--
Good night, and have a rational tomorrow!