capitals as letter names

Capital letters, instead of indicating nonstandard stress, should represent their lerfu. "A" = "abu", "B" = "by.", etc. --xod

• I like this idea. Nonstandard stress could always fall back on accented vowels. Acronyms in Lojban are currently very difficult to read, and in fact some people already use capital letters as lerfu to counter this. (In a recent thread I saw {JJM} used to refer to {jorne jecta co merko}.) Additionally, this gives a pronunciation to selma'o names. NIhO = {ny.ibu.y'y.obu}. And of course it opens up fascinating new avenues for abuse of the orthography. --rab.spir
  • I hope we come up with a better solution to the selma'o naming controversy than that! Whatever the name of NIhO in Lojban, I hope it involves the string ni'o and not NIhO. -- nitcion

• Inevitable vote against this. -- nitcion. :-) (Oh, and that's what JJM meant. This phobia of using plain merko, I still cannot fathom...)
  • The phobia might come from the issue of the Americas (North, Central, South) calling themselves that. Hence why I suggested steito. Or it might come from the strange desire some people have to use acronyms with no referents and watch people try to guess the meaning. -- rab.spir

• • One of these days, I'll make a Lojban aphorism of "the purpose of Lojban is to be clear, not cute." (jmibirti jenai zdile tutci se krinu la lojban.) Meanwhile, people, merko = U.S. merko != America. bemro joi ketco = America. The etymology of gismu is utterly irrelevant. -- nitcion.
  • I wrote JJM because the guy I was quoting wrote USA. If he had said America I'd have said merko. -cmeclax

• I don't totally like this, but on the other hand it isn't all that horrible. After all, the use as nonstandard stress and the use as lerfu don't conflict. Nonstandard stress would almost always have mixed case in a word (stressing a whole cmavo would only be necessary in poetry, where I would not think one would use the lerfu convention, for precision's sake), and lerfu- capitals would be all-caps. --mi'e mark.
• I don't see why this would be a problem if you're not looking for it to be parsed. Also, why just capital letters? A string of lowercase consonants is probably an acronym. -- Adam

• • The island off Dalmatia is called la krk; a string of lowercase consonants is not always an acronym. Mind you, if it's not a cmene, it might be safe to interpret it as an acronym; but I think this is more unsettling than the orthographic tricks I've been allowing myself (optional punctuation, numerals for numbers.) -- nitcion.
• I've always found capitals as stress to be ugly. On the Wiki, bold works. In e-mail, this could be done with a ^ or other character which has no relevance to Lojban otherwise, preceding the accented vowel. --rab.spir

• • Try using h where an acute accent mark is impossible. It looks better than ^. -- Adam
    • But h is already used as a capital y'y! We should probably try not to break two conventions in doing this, even if one is really obscure. I suppose using q or w would return to ugliness. --rab.spir

• • I prefer a ` mark or a ^ mark and never an "h", to indicate nonstandard stress: {nu,`iork} or {nu,^iork}, but not {nu,IORK} or {nu,hiork}. --xod
  • I feel we should have an acute accent for stress, grave for explicit unrounding and umlaut for explicit rounding. The grave and umlaut then are optional but help in writing to show the difference between, say, T�rkiye and *Tirkiye - one has an optionally-umlauted i in the lojbanization, while one has an optional grave accent - but both are correct if spelled tirki,ie, insofar as I can call any type 4 poo'ivla "correct." - mi'e. .kreig.daniyl.

• No, capital letters, at least for A-F, should be reserved for abbreviating hexadecimal digits. --tinkit
  • I suggested arbitrary symbols for that, in the very infrequent case when you need to talk about a lot of hex digits. This would be a terrible waste of the capital letters. At worst, say things like 83vei2gai. --rab.spir

• • A-F have their own pronunciations in words. At least A and E, as stressed vowels. If we make them into digits, that could be confusing. I guess I never much liked the A-F convention for hex digits in the first place, Lojban aside. Ideally, they should have their own symbols. Maybe the shifted versions of 0-5 (as a mnemonic for the decimalized) on a standard keyboard? (there goes cultural neutrality!) That gives: )!@#$% Woo.
  • ga'i.ienai le namcu cmavo pe loi mupli be li 16 na morji srana lei lerfu .i le glico tcaci na cinri la lojban. .i mi fapro le re se stidi .i ku'i le pamoi se stidu cu lojbo jinzi se mukti .i le namcu se stidi cu lacri lo mulno bartu be la lojban. .i le jinzi cu jinga -- mi'e nitcion.

• It turns out this was also allowed in Loglan: Loglan 1 (1989), p. 180:

Remember that each of the 100 three- and sx-letter words so generated may be represented in text in two ways

first, as a phonemically spelled word -- Tai, for example, which translates the phrase 'capital tee' in English -- and second, by its single-letter abbreviation, in this case the letteral T. Both representations are pronounced as the word itself is spelled, in the case of T and Tai as tigh. Thus the two differently written sentences: (1) Tai ditca "Tee is a teacher" (unusual in English text, but understandable) / taiDITca/ (2) T ditca "T is a teacher" /taiDITca/ are read aloud as the same utterance. This is exactly what we do when reading numerals aloud in English, of course. Thus 'He ate 3 doughnuts' and 'He ate three doughnuts' evoke exactly the same sounds.

• Acronyms need a consonant on the end like all good little cmene, don't they? This would probably mean "la JJMs". What also hasn't been mentioned is that this system wouldn't work if we wanted to sound out acronyms where applicable, like when pronouncing PETA as "peeduh", not "pee ee tee ay". Whether or not you use this convention in lojban doesn't change the fact that it is inevitable. If lojban had an acronym like "la py.ebuty.abus", it could and would be shortened to "la petas". --- mi'e .okus.