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la and cusku di'e [bi'i]
In what contexts is the interval meaning useful?
CLL's examples of bi'i give the interval meaning. Doing something from one o'clock to two o'clock requires the interval meaning. Standing between Dresden and Frankfurt can be interpreted either way, since presumably the x2 of sanli need not be just the point under one's feet. Distinguishing open and closed intervals only makes sense for the intervals, not for a point within the interval.
Am I right in thinking that you take bi'i to yield the interval,
Yes.
and (somehow, I don't grasp the rationale yet) use ji'i to get the value in the interval (as opposed to treating the following digits as approximate?
My use of {ji'i} is not really related to {bi'i}, since it only
applies to numbers, so it is not a general solution to get a
value in an interval. I might use {lu'a ko'a bi'i ko'e} for that.
The problem I have with {ji'i} as a digit modifier is that it
would be the only PA allowed to disrupt the positional value
of the digits. Lojban numbers are hard to understand on the fly
because the positional value is only marked for groups of three.
The value within the group comes just from the position, and so
we have to get used to identify the first digit with the
hundreds, the second with the tens and the third with the units
just from the three syllable structure. {ji'i} breaks this, and
for no gain, since marking any digit other than the least
significant as approximate is pointless.
The idea behind reji'ici is just the same as the CLL use of
{roci} for "all three", and other not in CLL but that can be
derived from the same idea, like: {za'ureme'ibi} = "more than
two less than 8", or {su'oresu'eci} = "between two and three".
i.e. just putting two number expressions one after the other
indicating that they refer to the same number. In the case
of {ji'i} the two expressions would be {re ji'i} and {ji'i ci}
and reducing the ji'i to one as no information is lost.
In any case, whether or not this is accepted, I don't think
{bi'i} is what we want here because it is not about an interval
but a single value within an interval.
mu'o mi'e xorxes
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