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ADVERTISEMENT 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?
-- **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** * Dr Nick Nicholas, French & Italian Studies nickn@hidden.email * 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. * **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****