Hesitation indicator. The psuedo-word ".y" is a hesitation noise. It maintains the floor while speaker decides what to say next. It is ignored for absolutely all grammatical purposes, except that before all other processing all pairs of Y+BU (i.e. ".y bu") are bound together and treated as a single word of selma'o BY (referring to the letter "y"). In particular, ".y" is skipped over by words that have special effects on nearby words (except for the special ".y bu" case above. This includes, but is not limited to, members of the following selma'o: SI, SA, SU, ZO, ZOI, and ZEI. To talk about the word ".y" (since "zo" cannot be used to quote it), use "zoi" to quote it or say "lo depsna valsi", meaning "the hesitation sound word".