A really useful quoting mechanism for beginners. la'e zoi gy. foo .gy can get you a looong way...
Um...is "foo" English?
Doesn't matter. zoi can quote anything. And the use of gy as the guard word doesn't necessarily mean anything. You can use anything. Some people like using gy in order to hint at the English/glico origin of the quoted text... and then got so used to it that they use it for everything else too. But it is never incorrect to use any given morphologically valid Lojban word as a zoi guard word, so long as it doesn't occur in the quoted text.
That reminds me. lapoi pelxu ku'o trajynobli uses gy as the guard for the translation, which contains the word energy. fixed
- A long text like that should really use a long and unlikely cmene as the delimiter, like, say, flububyrbabubyrbubz. (They bounce in the water like blubbery tubs.)
- Or even zoi glic. text glic.
- xy is a good guard word for English, since it has a non-English phoneme (making it safe for speaking) and the letters are rare in English (pretty safe for writing).
- There is some danger of confusion about English "uh huh".
- To be quite safe, if you like what you're quoting, quote it with xrula. (zoi xrula freedom xrula)
- And if you don't like it, quote it with xlali. (zoi xlali slavery xlali)
- I often use .gic. or .glic., especially in writing. In http://www.kli.org/kli/langs/KLIlojban.html I used .kliz. to quote Klingon words. Klingon writing has no k or z and Klingon speech has nothing confusable for z, and it is reminiscent of the language-name too. --mi'e mark.
- In written Lojban (such as in the GNOME translation, where you can't avoid the occasional non-Lojban term), I use < > as the delimiters. You can choose to pronounce these however you want.
foo