letters as themselves

According to the Book, to say "the letter t" we say "me'o ty.", because "ty." by itself means the referent of "t", by default the last thing referred to whose name or description begins with "t".

Discussion

• Doesn't that mean the mekso t, i.e., t considered as a mathematical expression? What's wrong with ty.bu?
  • ty.bu is also a letter - one named with the Lojban word ty, which only incidentally is another letter. ty.bu is (see Woldy 17.5) the name of the "thorn" (þ) character. Using it alone in a Lojban sentence would make it mean "the last thing referred to which (very improbably) began with þ."
  • To use ty.bu as the name of any ideograph other than the letter t would be obfuscatory. Stop me if I'm too radical, but I think when a meaning is 100% obvious and straightforward, we should consider accepting it.
  • You're missing it. ty. is the name for the letter t, not ty.bu. It also happens that anything-bu is a letter also, so it is being proposed to use the letter ty.bu, which is presumably distinct from the letter ty, to refer to thorn. (Mind you, using it alone in a sentence would be using is as a pro-sumti, referring to some thing which we are labeling with that letter, not the letter itself, hence the stuff about quoting it with me'o).
  • Thorn is more accurately .y'y.bu - /T/ is not a stop. It is an allowed variant of ' and should be written as ' rather than t as writing /T/ as a symbol that can only mean /t/ prevents people from pronouncing it correctly.
    • Huh? Thorn is a variant of '? And people hassle me about using h as a variant of '?? Oh, you mean the sound that thorn makes is an allowed variant of '. That doesn't make it the same letter.
      • No, what I said was /T/ is a variant of ' - thus Thorn should be transliterated with a ' and is thus better as .y'y.bu.
        • .y'y.bu already is the letter h.
• However, I find me'o ty. to be a bit unpleasant as well. What about zo ty.?
  • zo ty. is the word "ty.", not the letter 't'.
• How do we say "the sound of the letter t"?
  • le sance be tu'a ty
  • le sance be tu'a me'o ty, if anything.
• nalvokykai je molcrane dirsna (see phonetics)
• How do we say "J. L. B. Smith"? (He identified the gombesa as a coelacanth.)
  • Like most questions about names, this one has no definite answers, but jylybys. smit. probably communicates fairly well. If precision counts, then there is nothing for it but la'o greg. J. L. B. Smith .greg..