Subject: [lojban] Re: Any (was: Nick will be with you shortly)

From: Steven Belknap <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 1 Mar 2003 09:14:14 -0600

On Friday, February 28, 2003, at 12:56 PM, John Cowan wrote:

> Steven Belknap scripsit:
>
>> The typical lion's sex is unspecified, but is either male or female.
>
> No, the typical (as opposed to the average/mean/median/modal lion) is 
> neither
> male nor female, because it is not a lion at all.
>
>> a pride of lions climbs in to my Ford Windstar, I can separately
>> consider each lion as it enters and classify each lion as being 
>> typical
>> or atypical.
>
> This is a different sense of "typical" from the one being used here, 
> closer
> to "modal". It is expressed not with a gadri, but with "cnano".

Perhaps I have misunderstood. I have interpreted your use of the word 
"typical" to refer to a device or rule that can be used to inspect any 
given instance of a lion and determine whether or not it is "typical". 
This is *not* my understanding of "cnano", which I thought was 
normative - a sort of vague mean/median/mode reference. My lion in the 
Windstar example is *not* normative, it is an example of application of 
a rule.

Here is the AHD definition of typical:

1. Exhibiting the qualities, traits, or characteristics that identify a 
kind, class, group, or category: a typical suburban community. 2. Of or 
relating to a representative specimen; characteristic or distinctive. 
3. Conforming to a type: a composition typical of the baroque period. 
4. also typ·ic (-

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k) Of the nature of, constituting, or serving as a type; emblematic.

Which sense of "typical" is typical of the usage of "typical" that is 
"the one being used here"?

-Steven