TECH: a few points on cmavo

[John Cowan <cowan@SNARK.THYRSUS.COM>]

1) Despite Nick's retreat from it, I still like the idea of a pro-sumti
which eliminates the place it fills.  It is important to note that the
presence of this cmavo implicitly changes the selbri, in the same way that
the existence of a BAI place does so.  Indeed, the relationship is polar:
BAI tags add places rather than removing them.

I have assigned the cmavo "zi'o", leaving the set "zi'a zi'i zi'u" for
possible future use.  The pattern of -a/-i/-u is common in many selma'o.
The initial letter matches that of "zo'e" and "zu'i" but the vowels make
the cmavo phonologically distinct.

2) I believe there is a weakness in the current handling of quantitative
tenses.  These are formed with a number followed by "-roi", and may be
used to translate the English words "never", "once", "twice", ... "at all
times".  As explained in "Imaginary Journeys", however, the current
formulation is convenient but insufficiently strong.

Currently, a sentence like

        mi paroi klama le zarci
        I one-time go-to the store

means merely that during some unspecified interval of time I went (or will go)
to the store once.  It does >not< mean that I went to the store once and only
once, since I might have gone to the store at some time outside this implicit
interval.  Therefore, it is not possible to conduct logical reasoning
on the above statement (to deduce "It is false that I went to the store
twice", for example), since it is elliptical.

The problem would be solved if there was an explicit cmavo for expressing
the "universal time interval", stretching throughout all of time.  In that
case, the above example would indeed mean that I went to the store exactly
once.  (The exactness arises out of the nature of Lojban numbers, a discussion
I don't intend to rehash here.)

I suggest coopting the cmavo "ze'e" for this purpose.  Currently it refers
to a vague time interval; i.e. it is the same as no cmavo at all, and so
is redundant.  (An analogy: leaving off the time direction cmavo leaves
the question of past or future unspecified, but there is no cmavo that
expresses this unspecified-ness.)  In the same way, "ve'e" would be coopted for
the universal space interval.

3) I agree that "only" is too confusing to use as a keyword for the
proposed new discursive; "uniquely" is more like it.  But I believe it makes
sense to add a discursive saying that the present case, specifically that
part of it to which the discursive is attached, is without parallel.
The uniqueness expressed by this discursive is in-mind (non-veridical),
thus "Only Ralph knows where the treasure is" can be true, even though
whoever hid it also (in a timeless sense) knows.

I have assigned "po'o" to this job, which has been recycled from its
previous use as the terminator for certain non-bridi utterances.
It proved to be not necessary to have such a terminator.

--
John Cowan      cowan@snark.thyrsus.com         ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban.