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Xod: > And it is ugly. > > Here is a summary of my thoughts on ni, yet again, but this time because I > was asked: > > Conceived to provide a quantitative counterpart to the qualitative ka, Was it? How do we know this? > it is redundant with jei This is what I wanted to ask about. > and it's based on a deprecated notion of ka. I don't see that this is correct or relevant. > The deprecated sense of ka to which ni is bound was the miserable result > of the conflation between the English "redness" as the property of being > red (that's ka ce'u xunre; that which is shared by all red things) and the > amount of redness (that's jei ko'a xunre; it is 54% red). ni was supposed > to represent the latter sense, but that makes it redundant with jei. > > Up the present, my discussion with pc on this had two outcomes: one was > the question of whether jei ko'a xunre is actually an analog of the > redness of ko'a. It's an interesting question but I don't see why a > language that actually intended to be used would offer any other > interpretation of jei. In any case it's an interpretive convention, and > that's how I use it, and I don't know of any contrary usage. I agree that the ni/jei distinction can be collapsed, but each degree of ni/jei must also be associated with a property indicating whether it counts as a true-making degree or a false-making degree. In other (& hopefully clearer) words, the possible values of ni/jei can be grouped into those yielding True, those yielding False and those yielding Sorta. But as far as I can see there's nothing ugly about ni per se. Rather, just as the ka/du'u distinction does not exist, so it can be argued that the ni/jei distinction can be dispensed with. We just end up with two redundant cmavo. --And.