Re: TECH: query on zoi & laho terminators

[John Cowan <cowan@MAGPIE.LL.PBS.ORG>]

la .and. cusku di'e

> Will the stuff marked by "zoi gy." and "laho gy." *in writing*
> be terminated by:
>   (i) "energy" but not "lager" (or "saga", for you rhotics)
>   (ii) "lager" but not "energy"
>   (iii) either "lager" or "energy"
>
> (i) seems reasonable, but this means that what is
> grammatical Lojban when written may not be grammatical when
> read aloud.

Correct.  Such Lojban is discouraged in both speech and writing.

> If (iii) is the rule, does it apply to spoken Lojban as well?

Technically, the rule applied to speech is (ii), but again such usages
are discouraged.

> If it does, perhaps someone should think up robust default quotation
> demarcators for various languages, such that the demarcators
> are unlikely to occur in either the speech or the writing of
> that language. (E.g. for quoting English "jvy." might be
> fairly robust (whereas for French it wouldn't be: "je veux").)

Traditional delimiters for English include:

        "zoi" itself, which can occur in English, but is very rare;
        "kuot.", which is a Lojban name, and can occur, but has the
                advantage of easy recognition;
        "jau", which dates back to Loglan days.