Re: TECH: more thoughts on zi'o

[ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

> zi'o is a place-filler used to indicate that there is nothing in that
> place.

Not so: it is used to indicate that the place doesn't exist.

> This is prima facie logically problematic.  P(a,b,c,d,zi'o) cannot be taken
> to mean "there is no e such that P(a,b,c,d,e)",

In fact P(a,b,c,d,ziho) is true independently of whether
  there is no e such that P(a,b,c,d,e)
or
  there is some e such that P(a,b,c,d,e)

> It seems to me that if a place can be sensibly zi'o-ed, it doesn't belong
> in the definition at all.

Ziho changes the meaning in an only partly guessable way.

What we shd be deciding is not whether a place is zihoable (every place
is) but whether it is likely to be zihoed very very often (assuming
it gets zihoed when it should). In this case there is a good Zipfean
case for altering the place structure to exclude the oft-zihoed
place from the definition.

----
And                      KO JBOBANPEHO