mỉ should be distributive

[robintown]

mỉ is currently marked as collective. Given the current definition, it is ambiguous how this is supposed to be interpreted. It could mean either "___ is collectively named X" or "___ is everything that is named X". But neither of these are generally what one wants.

For example, consider the official example mỉ sảrā ní da. It is claimed to mean "this is Sarah", but with collective mỉ, it can only mean either "these things are collectively named Sarah" or "these things are everything in the universe of discourse that is named Sarah". Only if mỉ is distributive do we get the intended reading.

One may argue that you sometimes want to name things collectively—such as "the Smiths" (a family named Smith). This would still be possible with a distributive mỉ by manually specifying collectivity with mẻ, so making mỉ distributive would not cause us to lose any expressive power.

See the discussion in chat.