Subject: Re: [lojban] zo'e interpretation

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2001 15:51:40 EDT

In a message dated 10/1/2001 11:53:21 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Anyway, I'm not trying to persuade anybody to change the interpretation rule
> for zo'e; I'm just pointing out that your document is a little misleading 
> when it
> says that no interpretation rule is viable.
> 

What I said:
"This has led to occasional efforts to make Lojban more like FOPL by 
insisting that all terms always be stated or that, at least, there is a 
unique way of restoring unstated terms (more informative than {zo’e}) that 
can always be applied when misunderstandings appear.  Even the proponents of 
such moves find them impossible to stick to in general writing or 
conversation, even for very special narrow cases, but the efforts recur 
periodically."

That is, no one has come up with a way of uniquely restroring omitted terms 
that always works correctly and that a person will actually use. That is 
quite a way from saying that no interpetation rule (I might argue with the 
use of "rule" here, of course, as opposed to "guidelines," perhaps) is 
viable. People make reasoned interpretations all the time -- even 
prerationalized ones. But nothing like the rules (which got everybody up in 
arms) for finding the {ce'u}s in a ka phrase that had no overt ones -- and it 
actually would work.