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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

I love Lojban from the point of view of "eliminate ambiguity as a language feature", but the choice of turning classic punctuation characters into full fledged "letters" is.... odd. It also makes reading somewhat more difficult from anyone who uses a Latin character set and english-alike sentence structures (IMO, a single 100 level linguistics course does not make me an expert)

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Eliminating syntactic (not semantic) ambiguity is indeed a noble goal, but I was kind of horrified when I first realized how it's done in Lojban. Practically every type of phrase has both its start and its end marked by a unique word or class of words, with the terminator usually optional in any context where dropping it would not result in any ambiguity. Knowing exactly when dropping a terminator would result in ambiguity is pretty difficult, and in practice is rare enough that seeing a terminator is something of a surprise and usually requires a trip to look it up in the dictionary.

It seems to me that a grammar based on strictly right (or left) branching (that's prefix or postfix notation, or Polish or reverse Polish notation, for the programmers and mathematicians out there) would eliminate the need for all these optional terminators (which are effectively optional parentheses to clarify the order of operations).

> but the choice of turning classic punctuation characters into full fledged "letters" is.... odd

The ʻokina is sort of a precedent for this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language#Glottal_stop

although then people can have humongous arguments over whether it's correct to write it with ʻ, `, ', or other alternatives.

A glottal stop is not really a normal letter (for example in German it is not written at all), while the H is more of one, and it is written with a “'” in Lojban.

Edit: The Lojban “'” can also be considered not to be a real phoneme but to be more like a gilde sound between two vowels.

But maybe the glottal stop is only in German not considered to be a phoneme. (Actually it is more of a short pause, the snap is only an easy but not necessary way to do it.)

The letter thing is kinda understandable. They should have just used "h" instead of ' (even though that sound can technically be pronounced a number of ways, including as a dental fricative), but for the glottal stop "." which comes at the start and end of names and before particles that start with a vowel, I'm not sure anything else would work, while still being easy to type on a computer. The only other option that comes to mind is using one of the unused letters, but that might be even weirder, considering the latin alphabet doesn't have a letter for the glottal stop.

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