Yet another proposal, about "so'u"

[John Cowan <cbmvax!uunet!marob.masa.com!cowan>]

A small proposal this time, for disambiguating "su'o":

THE CURRENT SYSTEM:

Currently, the cmavo "su'o" mostly means "at least", by default
"at least one".  It can also be used as a pseudo-digit to indicate
that digits have been omitted, similar to the use of ellipsis in
mathematics (distinct from non-mathematical ellipsis).  For
example, cipipavopamusosu'o = 3.14159....


PROPOSED CHANGE:

Assign another cmavo for use as an ellipsis either on the left
or the right side of numbers.  "lo'o" is currently unassigned
(as of JL12) and resembles the new "li'o" used for ellipsis
within quotations.


RATIONALE:

The use of "at least" to mean "omitted digits" is derived from the
idea of "at least one digit omitted".  It seems to me that this is
making "at least" do too much work.  In addition, "su'o" can only
be used in this sense to omit digits at the least-significant
(right-hand) end.  Yet we often want to omit digits at the left end
as well; for example, this is the year '90.  English orthography
uses an apostrophe here rather than an ellipsis mark, but the
idea is the same: one or more digits are omitted here, being
understood in context.

In this style, the year number would be pasosono, or lo'osono.
In this particular case, no shortening would be achieved, but
quite otherwise for astronomers using the Julian day system,
whose base is 1 January 4173 B.C. (by the Gregorian calendar),
and who must deal with seven-digit day numbers.

-- 
cowan@marob.masa.com			(aka ...!hombre!marob!cowan)
			e'osai ko sarji la lojban