Re: [jboske] RE: Re: lo'edu'u

[Nick Nicholas <opoudjis@optushome.com.au>]

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On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Nick Nicholas wrote:

> Is lo'e merpre female, because we have like 2% more females here than
> males? Or is lo'e merpre a person who has a 51% chance of being
> female? I
> hope you won't skew to the latter simply because, in this case, it >seems
> to be less absurd; when you generalize what I am trying to say to >other
> cases, you'll see that either definition of lo'e (the former = mode, >the
> latter = mean) makes more sense in certain cases. A more palatable >example
> might be: does the lo'e merko lanzu have 2 or 2.3 kids? And don't be
> distracted by the idea that one is an abtraction and the other is not.

My current thinking is that, while {lo'e cinfo} is an abstraction, 
any properties it has must be the properties of at least one {lo 
cinfo}. So I would say 2 offspring. I don't like the threshold being 
50%, but if 50% it is, I'll admit that, in a population 51% female, 
{lo'e cinfo} is female.

I take my cue from natural language in this instance: the 
encyclopaedias do not say "The lion lives in the geometric mean of 
Africa and Iran", or "halfway up the Indian ocean", but "in Africa". 
Similarly, it does not say "the lion has 2.3 offspring" but "between 
2 and 3 offspring" (something that can be predicated of most 
individual lions, whereas 2.3 cannot.) Argumentation from English 
isn't of course compelling reasoning; but if we have any insight on 
what this "generic lion" is, it's from there.

The Typical Lion is no less an abstraction than the Average Lion, I 
agree. But the way I understand squinting, I think it always works by 
mode rather than average; and making it sometimes average, sometimes 
mode, depending on the property, makes it decidedly unwiedly; after 
all, why should habitat be mode and progeny average?


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* Dr Nick Nicholas, French & Italian Studies nickn@unimelb.edu.au *
University of Melbourne, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net
* "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the *
circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson,
* _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. *
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