From: Pycyn@aol.com
Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2003 19:26:11 EST
Subject: Re: [jboske] lo'e: Solomontean capitulation: resend
To: lojbab@lojban.org
CC: opoudjis@optushome.com.au
In a message dated 12/15/2002 8:41:22 AM Central Standard Time,
lojbab@lojban.org writes:
Somewhere in passing I
noted that you were co-inventor of lo'e back in 1977 or so (loe and lea),
so your opinion could be especially relevant.
Hey, maybe I was. But, if so, we did not have a very clear idea of what
we were up to exactly. I suspect this was just to deal with some English
expression we could not manage with the resources at hand. So what has
happened since is all discovery and legislation to meet those felt needs.
I've been thinking about those notions quite a bit lately. I like Nick's
idea to just take all of these ways of talking about properties
represented in a set with a single construction, modified for the way
these representation is derived.
I have mainly been thinking about "typical," what properties does a
typical broda "have." I think there are two criteria (at least):
dominance and coherence.
Dominance: For a property to be dominant, majority is neither necessary
nor suficient. A property may be typical if it adequaely outstrips any
rival, even if not all rivals combined. And a property may be strictly a
majority without thereby being typical, if there are rival peopreties that
come close enough in size (this is also the "adequately" for
pluralities). Thus, although one gnder or the other is a majority in most
species (it is unlikely that there are exactly the same number of each),
the typical member is neither male nor female, on this account, since the
rival is too close (not far enough away -- or maybe it is that the rival
is large enough to interfere; I'm not sure which). On the other hand, the
typical panda lives in Tibet, not because most pandas do but because more
do than anywhere else and each other place has only a very few -- not
enough to interfere with Tibet's claim.
Coherence. Once a number of properties of the typical broda are worked
out, others may come because they go with this set of properties, even if
they do not qualify on strictly numerical grounds. Thus, whatever the
distribution of sexes is among mosquitoes, the typical one is female
because mosquitoes typically bite (this subjective "typical," of course)
and only females bite. Similarly, I think that the typical lion is
female, since females are the ones that attack ungulates on the plains and
most of the other things lions typically do. (The stereotypical lion is
male, of course -- big ruff especially.) (I suspect that, when all is
said and done, the typical of any cat is female, but that is difficult to
be sure of, since outside of lions, sexual differentiation away from
reproductive organs is uncommon in cats.)