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lojbab
From: pycyn@hidden.email Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2003 19:26:11 EST Subject: Re: [jboske] lo'e: Solomontean capitulation: resend To: lojbab@hidden.email CC: opoudjis@hidden.emailIn a message dated 12/15/2002 8:41:22 AM Central Standard Time, lojbab@hidden.email 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.)
-- lojbab lojbab@hidden.email Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org