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xod: > On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, John Cowan wrote: > > > Invent Yourself scripsit: > > I think we agree, whereas you seem to think we don't. If we have a > > relation Rabc, we can project the relations Rab, Rbc, Rac, Ra, Rb, Rc > > from it with judicious use of zi'o. There are two kinds of instances > > of Rab, those which are derivable from an underlying Rabc and those which > > are not (teleporting and non-teleporting klama-ing, in my example) > > But motivationally, people are/should be moved to employ zi'o when the > place makes no sense in the relationship they are trying to express. If > the place is there but they don't wish to speak of it (non-teleporting, I > think) then it's a bit misleading to use zi'o. This is to get maximum > utility out of the cmavo This is why everybody hates zi'o. It was proposed as a fix to blotation (Bloated Gismu Syndrome, where the basic gismu has places that shouldn't be there and should have been addable by BAI or lujvo). So that you can, say, talk about bottles in general rather than lidded bottles in particular. Or tigers in general, rather than tigers with stripes. But it's incredibly counterintuitive to mark "there may or may not be a lid" and "there may or may not be stripes" by an overt word. When you think of bottles and tigers you don't normally stop to check whether or not you are thinking only of lidded and striped ones. And it's all to easy to intuitively misinterpret zi'o as meaning "is a lidless bottle", "is a stripeless tiger", in distinction to noda, "is not a lidded bottle", "is not a striped tiger". We all hated zi'o right from the start, and it is really only there in order to shush the people complaining about blotation. As a practicable solution to blotation it fails, which is why I advocate that elliptized zo'e should mean "zo'e a zi'o". > (And further, zi'o must be distinguished from noda.) > > > > The use of zo'e, however, leaves us with the original relation Rabc, but > > just fails to *express* one or more of a, b, or c. In order to find out > > the unexpressed value, one may inquire. This is not the same as the "in > > mind" that is a synonym for +specific > > why not? +specific means that to make the sentence truth-evaluable you first have to identify which particular thing is being referred to. But zo'e can have a value of "da", "something", which does not refer to a particular thing -- it is not +specific. You could say perhaps that zo'e 'refers' to a +specific *phrase*, while the phrase itself may be nonspecific. --And.