This discussion came up in IRC, starting about the pronunciation of the lojban definition of
y'y.bu, {lu y'y.bu li'u bu'ivla zoi ly.h.ly.}, specifically the {zoi ly.h.ly.} part. Because there is no word "h" in any language I know of, that definition would be impossible for a native lojban speaker to pronounce without knowing another language.
An alternative definition could be made using {se'e li panovo} or {se'e li xabi}, but the former could refer to "Ą" and the latter to "D". Let's try to solve that problem by adding {ju'u}.
Now we have {se'e li panovo ju'u pano} for base ten and {se'e li xabi ju'u paxa} for base sixteen.
However, {li pano ju'u paxa} (10 in base sixteen) is the same as {li paxa} (16), and {ju'u} is an operator and can therefore be chained.
Now we have {se'e li xabi ju'u pano ju'u paxa} for base sixteen.
And because we have no default base, we can make one or both of the {ju'u PA*} implicit, and any {ju'u} with a second argument that is more than one digit long is ambiguous.
I can say {se'e li xabi ju'u vei vai su'i pa ve'o} to be unambiguous, but that's quite a lot longer than the English equivalent of "U+0068".
There are two ways this could be solved that I can think of:
- make {se'e} have a default base (hexadecimal?)
- make {ju'u} have a default base (decimal?)