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Re: [lojban] x2 of remna



Where do you get the idea that zo'e is a constant? As I understand it, {mi viska ci cakcinki} is equally true if I see three Japanese beetles (of which there are many on the blackberry plants) or if I see a cocuyo, a scarab, and a weevil.

xorxes, at least, intended for zo'e to be a constant [1]. zo'e (especially explicit zo'e) as a variable would be problematic for negation [2].

[1] https://mw.lojban.org/papri/BPFK_Section:_gadri#Notes_2
[2] http://mail.lojban.org/lojban-list/msg47182.html

I’m pretty sure this is not how all this works. If a place isn’t invoked,
it doesn’t participate in the quantification; therefore, «so’i cakcinki cu
xabju lo purdi» has *unary* «cakcinki», so the correct meaning – ‘there are
many beetles living in the garden.’

In practice it does seem like unfilled places don't exist, although if you ask people they'll usually say that there is something filling them, most often zo'e [3-5], hence my slightly tongue-in-cheek outrage.

[3] https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la_karda#Elliptical_words
[4] https://lojban.github.io/cll/7/7/
[5] https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban_Wave_Lessons/2

Some will say unfilled places are zi'o, which is blessed with at least two competing meanings, or that they are ambiguous between zo'e and zi'o.

zi'o1: remove the place, creating a new predicate that has nothing do to with the removed place
zi'o2: remove the place on the surface by substituting {be su'oi da}

zi'o2 is, imo, only marginally better than zo'e, as it still takes only one value when in a LO phrase.

zi'o1 is nice, but feels pragmatically odd in that when explicit, it's supposed to make an utterance less specific by adding words to it, which might give a weak implicature that {broda zi'o .e no da}. Though this is just baggage from zo'e officially being default I think -- implicit zi'o1 should be free of it.


la tersmu agrees:
  purdi(c0); (so'i)x1:(cakcinki(_)). zvati(x1,c0)

(I wouldn't think tersmu has much to say here as it doesn't have a dictionary of predicates' arities)

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