Leading Hyphen Convention

When you are too lazy to look up or create a selbri, or you are writing an example and think using the right brivla would just obscure the point, you can kluge up a "Level 0 fu'ivla" by writing an English (or other natlang word) and preceding it with a "-".

For example: la djordj. buc. cu -president ubu.sy.

  • And to pile la osas. on la pelion., you can actually enunciate these things by pronouncing the leading hyphen as Lojban "iy", one of the two reserved diphthongs: /ladZordZ?buS?Suj@prEz@dEnt?ubu?s@/. I think it was Nora who pointed this out. — John Cowan



Without condoning this practice (mi'e nitcion), the first time I remember seeing this was http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/9930 . John, did you devise this convention, or is it older?

  • It was first used AFAIK in a JL article, demonstrating the folly of Anglan by replacing all the brivla in a couple of paragraphs of Lojban text with hyphen-prefixed English words; it was just as much jabberwocky as before.



xrukykai carmi (nago'i .i za'e se zombi)


Created by admin. Last Modification: Friday 30 of November, 2001 12:31:04 GMT by admin.