zi'o & otpi (was: RE: [lojban] So, wait til you feel a cold no-nose

["And Rosta" <a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com>]

> From: Jorge Llambias [mailto:jjllambias@hotmail.com]
> Sent: 04 May 2000 14:40
>
> {zi'o} is used to drop a place, but I avoid it as much as
> I can, it doesn't feel right. 

It feels right to me only when it is slightly counterintuitive
-- where the resulting predicate is substantially different
from the original, e.g. le se gerku be zi'o, for a dog breed
that exists independently of actual dogs.

The issue of place dropping more generally arises [in my
imaginary Lojban usage, at least] in the case of those many 
gismu where peripheral places are filled by elided zo'e but 
you don't really want to have to check that you really are 
claiming that each of these zo'e can be replaced by a da/de/di.

Nobody's going to have the energy to replace elided zo'es with
overt zi'os. Knowing you, I'd predict that your strategy 
would be to ignore them in usage, so that usage eradicates
them. But (and I think here is a case where the lack of
linguistics experience of much of Lojbania shows) a prevalent
usage pattern is distinct from but hard to distinguish from
a rule of grammar, and the power of pragmatics is such that
it is both normal and feasible for people to say something that 
literally means X but in use habitually conveys Y. The language
will either be defined by usage, in which case its grammar will
be relatively vague and indeterminate, or it will be defined by
formal documentation, in which case usage will largely be 
irrelevant. (Presumably, until computers are as intelligent as
people, computers would have to speak the formally documented
version.) So in reality, usage will never "decide" between 
alternatives; it will merely create doubt among them as to which 
is correct.

So better than zi'oing off unwanted places, or pretending they're
not there, is to use some alternative brivla. If VCCV fu'ivla
really are kosher then they are an attractive solution, since
they're even shorter than gismu, and although they don't have
rafsi, in lujvo you could use the too-many-placed gismu, because
in lujvo formation you can lose unwanted places inherited from
the component gismu. So, for example, if you want a word for
"bottle such that something actually is a bottle even when
it's empty", then you could use "otpi" (with, in lujvo, the 
same rafsi as "botpi"). If "otpi" were as well-documented as
"botpi", it'd stand a chance of competing against it in usage,
and then usage really would tell you which was the more popular.

--And.