metalinguistic quotation

[Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!lojbab>]

I haven't been reading mail closely the last week, but someone (I think
Colin) asked about quotation without lu/li'u for conversation recording.
Colin, and anyone else who has it, will find many examples of this in
the Saki translation in JL10.  It was part of the reason for inventing
"sei" metalinguistic 'parentheses'.  With "sei", you can (lojbab says)
jump out of the quote to identify the speaker much as I am doing in this
sentence.  You can (he asserts boldly) thereby make for more interesting
(he smiles) narrative.  If you use SV or SOV order, you generally don't
need the terminator; trailing sumti are attached with be/bei to also
make the terminator less mandatory.

mi klama sei la lojbab cusku [se'u] le zarci

An earlier form of this, the one invented by Jim Carter, is the BAI modal
"cu'u"  THis non-metalinguistically inserts a speaker as a sumti in a
bridi.  We decided that this was not good enough for full-featured discourse
since you cannot easily associate this with partial sentences and the like,
and you cannot add the variety of formthat is parodized by what are
known as "Tom Swifties" in the US - adding various colorful verbs and adverbs
to avoid the boring and repetitious:  he said ... she said ... he said ...

Now if Colin is trying to avoid making any marker of quotation, he is seeking
more freedom than we have in English.  It is not normally considered legit
style to record conversation exchanges without quote marks, or new paragraph
and dashes, or something else.  All of these typographical conventions
are reflected in Lojban as cmavo.  Thus one can say that the sei/se'u and
cu'u conventions actually allow somewhat more freedom in Lojban than is
considered valid in English.

If this doesn;t answer the qiestion, let me know, or I'll add more info
after I reread the week's traffic.

lojbab