Everyday expressions like hello, thanks, and sorry are among the first words any language learner needs, yet in Blissymbolics they lack a consistent grammatical home. Some are classified as nouns, others as verbs, and several carry the intensity marker as a stand-in for emotional force. Blissary introduces the interjection classifier to bring compositional consistency to these essential words.

The interjection character

The interjection character is built from two ideas: feeling combined with mouth, expression, a spoken expression of feeling. In the BCI lexicon this character exists as "slang", but we repurpose it as a word-level classifier: when it appears as the first element in a compound, it marks the whole word as an interjection.

A note on the intensity marker

The BCI lexicon often uses the intensity marker to convey exclamatory force, as in yes! (B120/B401/B401) or nonsense! (B471/B401). This works at the sentence level as a kind of emphasis, but it doesn't classify the word as an interjection. A classifier tells us what part of speech a word is; intensity tells us how strongly it's expressed. These are different jobs, and we think they deserve different tools.

Comparison table

The table below shows how common expressions are currently classified in the BCI Authorized lexicon alongside the proposed interjection form. Background colors on each symbol indicate its part of speech.