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At 06:09 PM 1/13/03 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
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).
Whereas I wanted such to be solved by lujvo, but there was no jvajvo rule that provided for deleting a place from a bloated gismu and people seemed unwilling to use non-jvajvo means or to define a zil without having a corresponding zi'o or to come up with some sort of other rule on how to do it.
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.
Whereas by Lojbab's founder-intent (as opposed to Cowan's) an unlidded bottle is simply not expressed with botpi - zi'o or otherwise, but as some other kind of vasru. Just like a "nu zi'o catra" is not expressed with catra but with mrobi'o. Thus the Lojban words simply map semantic space differently from English (or arbitrary other natlang), rather than using heavy-handed techniques to make Lojban words work in the same way English words do.
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.
Then you aren't thinking of botpi and tirxu, but vasru (possibly patxu) and mlatu.
If this means that I'm inclined to think of a zebra as more of a tirxu than a stripeless tiger is, well, that's how the place structures work.
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".
But if "zi'o" is effectively a superset of "zo'e" then "zo'e a zi'o" means merely "zi'o"
> (And further, zi'o must be distinguished from noda.)
Yes, is "noda" a subset of zi'o values, of zo'e values, or is it exclusive of both so that we have xod's trichotomy of normal roads, circular roads, and parking lots (which matched my own intuition of zi'o)
Cowan's and your answer appear to say everything is a subset of zi'o, and it doesn't meaning anything but is just a sumti place-filler.
Whereas actual usage often matches xod's trichotomy and the example and explanation in CLL appears to endorse a dichotomy with it being unclear whether noda is part of zo'e or zi'o.
> > 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.
I think we are agreed that zo'e cannot have the value nodaIf we could distinguish indeterminable (many values legal but none are more correct than others) from elliptical (at least one specific value) from null (no value legal) from Cowan-zi'o (I'm not saying whether there is a legal value, just filling the place) we might get somewhere. But that list poses up to three possible components of zi'o meanings besides zo'e, and I dunno which is or should be correct and whether we need the others.
But it sure makes it damned hard to understand the discussion when we are using zi'o (and mo'ezi'o) to mean a variety of incompatible things, some of which are not exclusive of others.
lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@hidden.email Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org