leading Hyphen Convention
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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 luge 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 LeChevalier ora who pointed this out. -- John Cowan
Without condoning this practice (mi'e nitcion), the first time I remember seeing this was [1] . 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)