From @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Wed May 8 22:40:53 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Sun, 9 May 1993 02:44:12 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 4610; Sun, 09 May 93 02:43:38 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 4275; Sun, 09 May 93 02:44:31 EST Date: Sun, 9 May 1993 02:40:53 EDT Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: xo'e and noda X-To: dave@VFL.Paramax.COM X-Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Message-ID: I believe that zo'e carries existential import - i.e., I cannot see that you can use zo'e, with it possibly standing for "noda". Nor can I see that a claim that you are "tavla"ing can be true if there is no audience. (You might be bacru-ing (uttering), or ciska-ing (writing), or otherwise expressing yourself, but tavla is as much dependent on there being a talked-to, a subject, and a language, as it is on there being a talker. Turning this around a different way, remember that "zo'e" is the implied value when you leave a place unstated. Would you accept the observative "tavla" as having existential import as to there being a talker (much less an audience); how about "fagri" for a fire. If zo'e/place omission could imply that the place did not have a value, people >would< have to explicitly come up with a value that would be used most all of the time, and which >would< have existential import. It is Englsih (and many natural languages) that allow you to pretend that something may not exist, when you leave it unstated. In Lojban, the existence of a place in the place structure means that there must be a value for that sumti/argument within the predicate, or you need a different predicate. I personally prefer the lujvo method to devise such variant predicate meanings/ structures (and would even welcome conventions that made it clear that this was being done, to the xo'e method. But there has been enough strong proponents of the idea that I am not going to oppose it being given a real cmavo, and letting usage decide if it has real value. (That pc has apparently also agreed to its acceptability also puts my mind at relative ease on its suitability in a logical language.) lojbab