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Lojbab:
> At 12:18 PM 1/9/03 -0500, Invent Yourself wrote:
> > > If it is agreed that tu'o cannot overlap both zi'o and zo'e (I remain
> > > unconvinced of this)
> >
> >I don't find such an ambiguity acceptable at all
>
> That is a plausible argument, but if it is valid then it then suggests that
> ALL places where we have a zo'e-like elliptical word, we need a zi'o
> equivalent as well (co'e, do'e, do'i, fu'u, ge'e (the zi'o is the computer
> attitudinal %^), and ju'a, with others possibly not noticed).
A better solution is not to allow ellipsis when a zi'o value is possible,
so that zero = zi'o. Zi'o itself is a kludge universally detested, but
the notion that what is not said aloud is not said at all is much more
palatable.
> And why not have a zu'i for each of these as well?
Or have fewer selmaho and more converter cmavo.
> Complete semantic refinement a la
> And requires beaucoup new cmavo, none of them necessarily justified by
> usage. (And Jorge will be caught between his demand to eliminate lots of
> rarely used cmavo that JCB and I added for analytical reasons - and his
> support for semantic refinement which will create more such.)
>
> >, then this is a clear case for adding a new cmavo, in
> > > which case the CLL usage would justify giving tu'o the zi'o interpretation
> > > (though I don't think it requires a zi'o interpretation to make sense as a
> > > null operand, it is consistent with same to do so), but the case has to be
> > > made that tu'o needs that specific a definition, ESPECIALLY in
> light of the
> > > fact that I don't think we have any other cmavo that are simple
> > > abbreviations for a two-cmavo string (which seems like a waste of cmavo to
> > > me), so it seem clear that there was no INTENT that tu'o mean something so
> > > simple
> >
> >Didn't you recently note that tu'o can grammatically be used in cases
> >where mo'ezi'o can't go?
>
> mo'ezo'e actually. The usage in question was tu'o as an elliptical digit
> value, as in pasosotu'o (1990's), or retu'o (20-something).
pasosotu'o would be nineteen-ninety-something, not 1990s, for tu'o
= mo'ezo'e. I forget how 1990-9 is done -- is it pasosoji'i?
> I'm not sure
> anyone has posed any correponding use of tu'o=mo'ezi'o wherein it could not
> in fact be replaced by mo'ezi'o.
Maybe {su'o pi ZI'O}, {su'o fi'u zi'o} = "su'o ranging only over integer
values".
> But I'm not going to argue against the
> split, because we do indeed have to support the admittedly kludgy RPN unary
> operator grammar that led to tu'o in the first place. I can't think of a
> situation where the ambiguity between vacuous and elliptical leads to
> pragmatic ambiguity, but if there is one (and I can imagine there could
> be), that is an argument for an operand zi'o
>
> But I start to wonder whether it would not be better to add a cmavo
> paralleling kau that could attach in the same way to any word in a selma'o
> and make it a vacuous member of that selma'o. That would require a CLL
> change since the vacuous RPN operand would be "PAzi'o", assuming zi'o
> became that vacufier (I'm not proposing this, I think - we could add new
> word, and leave the old ones as redundancy in preference to changing
> CLL). We could add another word to this set for your "only possible
> value", if it is justified - I suspect it has usages other than for
> quantifiers, and indeed sounds a little like one meaning of "only"
>
> I'm not pushing for any change at all of course - but if I have to accept
> that a fix is needed, let us make sure it is the right one
I'd prefer changing the rules for construing ellipsis, and possibly
adding UI to mark ellipsis -- you'd just add it where the unelliptized
word would occur.
This wouldn't solve the problem of what to do when you can't
elliptize a word but need it to be semantically vacuous, as
with the cmavo that turn a bridi into a sumti.
--And.