First-order expressibility of languages with neutral letters or: The Crane Beach conjecture

A language L over an alphabet A is said to have a neutral letter if there is a letter [email protected]?A such that inserting or deleting e's from any word in A^* does not change its membership or non-membership in L. The presence of a neutral letter affects the definability of a language in first-order logic. It was conjectured that it renders all numerical predicates apart from the order predicate useless, i.e., that if a language L with a neutral letter is not definable in first-order logic with linear order, then it is not definable in first-order logic with any set N of numerical predicates. Named after the location of its first, flawed, proof this conjecture is called the Crane Beach …