Re: [jboske] The two faces of tu'o (was: Nick on propositionalism &c. (was: Digest Number 134))

[Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 12:18 PM 1/9/03 -0500, Invent Yourself wrote:
> > If it is agreed that tu'o cannot overlap both zi'o and zo'e (I remain
> > unconvinced of this)
>
> I don't find such an ambiguity acceptable at all.

That is a plausible argument, but if it is valid then it then suggests that 
ALL places where we have a zo'e-like elliptical word, we need a zi'o 
equivalent as well (co'e, do'e, do'i, fu'u, ge'e (the zi'o is the computer 
attitudinal %^), and ju'a, with others possibly not noticed). And why not 
have a zu'i for each of these as well? Complete semantic refinement a la 
And requires beaucoup new cmavo, none of them necessarily justified by 
usage. (And Jorge will be caught between his demand to eliminate lots of 
rarely used cmavo that JCB and I added for analytical reasons - and his 
support for semantic refinement which will create more such.)

> , then this is a clear case for adding a new cmavo, in
> > which case the CLL usage would justify giving tu'o the zi'o interpretation
> > (though I don't think it requires a zi'o interpretation to make sense as a
> > null operand, it is consistent with same to do so), but the case has to be
> > made that tu'o needs that specific a definition, ESPECIALLY in light of the
> > fact that I don't think we have any other cmavo that are simple
> > abbreviations for a two-cmavo string (which seems like a waste of cmavo to
> > me), so it seem clear that there was no INTENT that tu'o mean something so
> > simple.
>
> Didn't you recently note that tu'o can grammatically be used in cases
> where mo'ezi'o can't go?

mo'ezo'e actually. The usage in question was tu'o as an elliptical digit 
value, as in pasosotu'o (1990's), or retu'o (20-something). I'm not sure 
anyone has posed any correponding use of tu'o=mo'ezi'o wherein it could not 
in fact be replaced by mo'ezi'o. But I'm not going to argue against the 
split, because we do indeed have to support the admittedly kludgy RPN unary 
operator grammar that led to tu'o in the first place. I can't think of a 
situation where the ambiguity between vacuous and elliptical leads to 
pragmatic ambiguity, but if there is one (and I can imagine there could 
be), that is an argument for an operand zi'o.

But I start to wonder whether it would not be better to add a cmavo 
paralleling kau that could attach in the same way to any word in a selma'o 
and make it a vacuous member of that selma'o. That would require a CLL 
change since the vacuous RPN operand would be "PAzi'o", assuming zi'o 
became that vacufier (I'm not proposing this, I think - we could add new 
word, and leave the old ones as redundancy in preference to changing 
CLL). We could add another word to this set for your "only possible 
value", if it is justified - I suspect it has usages other than for 
quantifiers, and indeed sounds a little like one meaning of "only".

I'm not pushing for any change at all of course - but if I have to accept 
that a fix is needed, let us make sure it is the right one.

lojbab

lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
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