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And Rosta scripsit: > 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. Well, yes, everyone hates the syntax of zi'o. But some people, like Bob, hate (or more precisely, fail to comprehend) its semantics as well. He thinks that a botpi be zi'o is a lidless bottle, rather than being a bottle whether lidless or not. His retort to this is: if it's lidless, it's just not a botpi, and if it has no stripes, it's not a tirxu, and the denotation of "bottle" and "tiger" are just irrelevant. > 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. Indeed. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan jcowan@hidden.email Be yourself. Especially do not feign a working knowledge of RDF where no such knowledge exists. Neither be cynical about RELAX NG; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment in the world of markup, James Clark is as perennial as the grass. --DeXiderata, Sean McGrath