Re: logban '

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

"h" will never be the preferred for for ' because it makes the language
harder to learn.  It is also, as I said on conlang, changing a rational
design decision for the benefit of computers, which many are opposed to
on general principles (though I understand that jimc is not so opposed).

I do not understand the "invisibility" of apostrophe to Mark Shoulson, unless
people who have written to him don't very clearly handwrite.  Most significant
punctuation marks are quite easy to see if reasonably handwritten, and in the
case of Lojban, this symbol can only appear in a very limited set of
conditions (between two vowels in a single word), and is only significant
for those vowel pairs which can be interpreted as dipthongs.

I invented the apostrophe, and remain quite proud of it.  Most design decisions
about Lojban were either inherited from JCB, or pretty much made necessary by
circumstances.  We could have done something other than an apostrophe, and
perhaps even done something other than make a dichotomy between divowel and
diphthong, but I remain convinced that it was the best design decision
possible.  My antipathy for unix no doubt helps in maintaining this attitude,
but I haven't had any compaints from any people OTHER than unix users (or
C programmaers in general) in any case.

lojbab