Accents for apostrophes?

[Chris Bogart <cbogart@QUETZAL.COM>]

>The basic problem is that, in fixed-width founts at least, {'} contains
>a lot of white space and so tends to break things up.  Many languages
>use an apostrophe as a kind of word-separator so that this isn't such
>a problem -- and few languages use quite as many as Lojban.

Hmmm, I can see that, but I usually use a proportional font, so I'm used to 
lojban words looking pretty coherent.

How about this: a graphical convention that says in a fixed-width font (or 
any font, I guess) you can represent the apostrophe by a forward accent over 
the second letter, or a backward one over the first letter, or something 
like that.  For your example sentence, 
        {.itu'e ro ma'arbi'i ba galtu}  
we could write: 
        {.itué ro maárbií ba galtu}

Unfortunately that probably won't help much with usenet/email lojban, since 
people don't always have the same accented letters available, and people who 
do are more likely to have proportional fonts available anyway!


>I do find that the {'}s and {.i}s do make Lojban visually incoherent.

Usually the {.} appears at the beginning or end of a word, so it only 
contributes to breaking the words apart.  So I have to disagree about {.i}.  
I do agree in the case of words like "na.a" that have a period in the middle 
of them.  But they're quite rare.