Re: h vs '

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

Because there is a visual orthographic reason - ' is NOT an "alphabetic
character" in the strictest sense of the word, in Lojban.  Lojban was also
not designed to be encoded in other programming languages (some people want to
see if Lojban could itself be a programming language, of course), and most
utilities I've used that did not come from unix originally have had no trouble
with the apostrophe.

Most languages use non-alphanumeric characters for orthogrphic and diacritic
functions, which is what they are used for in Lojban.  I notice, BTW that
apostrohe is also used in your Irish sig line.  (Irish as written by some
people is even more irritating because they write one diacritic on the line
 previous in order to have it "above" the character it modifies.  This is really
bad when you print in most non-Courier fonts, not to mention all manner of
other editors.  Is there as good a reason for this convention as there is
for the Lojban convention, especially given that most languages with diacritics
manage to get by with writing them before or after the modified character in
some form or another?)

We catered to computer people (or rather typists and computer people) by making
a language that can be typed on all standard keyboards that have a Roman
alphabet, and I believe without a shift on any of them (I don't know all
foreign keyboards, of course).  The few capitals used in the language are
the only exception, and they strongly mark a word as non-Lojban as a result.
Given that apostriphe is used for similar purposes in other languages made it
seem a most reasonable thing to do, and the lack of problem I have with using
 iwith virtually all of my computer-based activities shows that it is indeed a
operating system/language dependency.

Since automated computer processing can easily replace apostrophe with "h"
which is used for no other function, this should be no more difficult a
function than the more typical one in computer processing of having to
use upper/lower case shifts to make normally interchangeable equivalents
compare as equals (of course unix violates the norms in that regard as well
by being case sensitive, but while my antipathy for unix makes me not unhappy
that Lojban conflicts with it, unix was not a factor in the design of the
language in any way (I didn't know anything about unix in 1986-7).

lojbab