so, singulatives...

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

OK, because I'm getting confused very quickly, I want to make sure 
I'm on the same page with my learned friends on the other side. :-)

The victory And proclaimed on lo'e (which, yes, was premature) is 
that we accept lo'e is a singulative. In other words, lo'e takes a 
population of potentially members, and somehow boils them down to one.

This, unfortunately, doesn't answer much, because you can boil down a 
population to one in many, many ways. So, let's take ages as an 
example property -- a nice stats example.

There are in the world five prenrxluxramute (wherever the hell 
Khlukhramut may be.) Of these 5 people, Abe is 30, Bea is 27, Col is 
30, Di is 112, and Eoin is 2.

How old is lo'e prenrxluxramute?

If squinting is all about stats and modes, as I've taken it, s/he's 30.

That's not the only way to get a singular out of a plural. A maximum 
will do it too. So a different kind of squinting would see only the 
extremes, and make it 112.

A different kind again ("the average Khlukhramuti") would take an 
average, and come up with 40.

If it's all about the prototype, and the subjective, as And suggests, 
then how old lo'e prenrxluxramute is depends on who's talking.

The prototypical bird flies, and it's what we first think of when we 
think 'bird'; it's probably closer to a sparrow than an albatross. 
Not necessarily because we've done a statistical sampling, but 
because most birds we end up seeing are like sparrows. This notion 
(the notion of a 'basic' exemplar) is as much tied with perception 
and psychology as any putative objective trends. And someone who has 
spent most of his life as an Ancient Mariner probably thinks 
'albatross' first. Prototypes are notoriously culture-specific after 
all.

So what shall {lo'e broda} be? And and Jorge are, on this one, on the 
side of fluffiness and non-dogmatic logic. To say lo'e shall always 
be a mode presupposes you can objectively track trends in the 
population, which comes close to claiming omniscience. (But as I will 
say if I ever get to the email it came up in, yes, it's the sentence 
claiming the omniscience, not the person.) To say "it depends", as 
And does and I take it Jorge concurs, you allow that people squint on 
their own terms, in their own contexts. You allow {lo'e cipini} to be 
an albatross.

And yet, I come back to what my forebears have. The prototype in this 
sense is closer to le'e than lo'e. Very close, in fact, because it 
singulates out of a psychologically salient subclass of lo'i cipni 
--- birds of a reasonable size. And le'i cipni is likewise all about 
a psychologically salient subclass of lo'i cipni --- the ones you 
want to talk about. And if you wanted to talk about the prototypical 
Khlukhramuti, how could you *avoid* ending up with your 
culture-specific stereotype of them?

Moreover, faced with a choice of how to singulate --- how to squint, 
if you will, I feel obliged to do something that may infuriate 
people, but is the only politic thing to do in this community. I go 
back to the original definition.

The keyword is 'typical', and the example is 'The lion lives in 
Africa'. And I think that's picking the objective mode of squinting 
("I surveyed all lions, and found..." An encyclopaedic statement is 
not contingent on personal experience.

This is fettering lo'e to an English construction, and it's not 
making lo'e as useful as it might possibly be. But I think this is 
still the sane and conservative thing to do.

The prototype still lingers in such statements, though. As someone 
has pointed out, such encyclopaedic statements imply a 'real lion': 
when you talk about lion habitats, it's implied that you're talking 
about them in the wild. If 70% of all lions live in Western zoos, the 
encyclopaedias still will speak of Africa, because they're appealing 
to the prototype, that still lives in the wild. In that case, I'd 
rather Lojban overliteralise, and say that {lo'e cinfo cu xabju loi 
darlyjmazda}.

I finally see where you're coming from, And; the point of lo'e for 
you is not 'typical', but 'singulative'; and 'prototypical' is a more 
satisfying singulative than 'typical' (or at least, it often is --- 
often enough you want to be able to use lo'e for prototypes.) Maybe, 
maybe not; but 'typical' is what the word list said; and while the 
word list has said a lot of stupid things, it is what has informed 
most of our understanding of these words. It also informed John's 
Lion; and John's Lion, being in CLL, is going to be exceedingly hard 
for us to sidestep.

--
**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****
* 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. *
**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****