TECH: more on xo'e

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

Cowan said, regarding the "xo'e" proposal to allow semantic place
deletion:
>I still cannot come up with any satisfactory scheme for marking place
>deletion directly in the selbri, where it belongs.  My general idea is
>that there should be a new sort of SE-equivalent, similar to JAI, which
>has the effect of deleting a specified place (swapping it with limbo?),
>with a format something like "xi'o #" where "#" indicates which place to
>delete.  But all ways of specifying "#" (SE cmavo, FA cmavo, actual
>numbers) seem unbearably ugly.  Can anyone see how to do this?

If the proposal is going to operate at the selbri level, rather than the
sumti level, it must result in a renumbering of the places.  You don't
want to have to try to figure out what le xi'o-1 selbri is.  (i.e. you
delete the first place and then refer to it in the description.)  In
addition, it would seem counter to logic to deny the existance/relevance
of a place and then leave it with a place number.

Because FA operation do not result in renumbering, and SE operations DO
result in renumbering, this suggests that a SE-related process is the
way to go (at least at the selbri level).  On the other hand, this has
the problem (as And complained about for other reasons) that SE has no
element for referring to the x1 place explicitly.

One way that has not been cosidered, but which would have small
effect on the grammar, would be to use "nai".  I have mixed feelings about
something like "senai" because the type of effect it has is drastically
different from the effect of normal conversion, but modulo the missing
x1 referent, this seems to meet the need.

Another possibility would be to allow FA tags as inflections (they are
otherwise similar to modals in grammar, and this would be parallel to
using modals as inflections.  Since "fa selbri" is undefined right now,
it wouldn't even need an additional word like xi'o, though we might want
one.  If it was decided that there was merit in And's analysis claiming
a need for a xo'e and a xe'o, one to delete the place as irrelevant, the
other to assert the predicate with no value in that place, we have the
capability (I think) to allow both FA and FA+NAI as inflection.

Whether these plausible ways are good ones, I cannot say.

BTW, the reason I claimed that this operation is metalinguistic (which
John disagreed with) is PRECISELY because we are operating on a selbri
which DOES include the place we want to delete.  All methods proposed of
deleting a place are inherently going to have to mention that place,
which to me is on its face a metalinguistic reference.  I'll accept that
SOI may not do the job (though this may be a weakness of our definition
of SOI, which has seen little real use), but SOI also is metalinguistic
while making a secondary assertion (the 'vice versa' one).

lojbab