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Originally Posted by dwnielsen
Is this a valid sampling?
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No single example is a valid sampling. Fortunately the naming process applies to thousands of bodies.
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Originally Posted by dwnielsen
If I were to randomly talk to a few speakers of Romance languages today, should I trust their account of the stories of the ancients? Oral tradition has its place, but is very prone to distortion in a small sampling, especially in a culture that has dramatically changed.
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So you have something against the actual spoken traditions of present-day Rapa Nui people? What makes you reject their traditions in favour of ancient inaccessible ones? By that reasoning, we must reject Latin and Greek tradition, since it is merely a shadow of the unknown proto-Indo-European mythos, which in turn reflected even earlier traditions.
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Originally Posted by dwnielsen
An unfixed holiday in the Christian calendar that has extremely little reference to the ancient Rapa Nui people - a date that is not even agreed upon between churches, even if one were to assume one date is correct.
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It's a pun. It doesn't need to connect to the ancient Rapa Nui people. I'm no great fan of Mike Brown's rather laboured word-play myself, but discoverers are permitted to make linkages that we don't necessarily like.
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Originally Posted by dwnielsen
Very true (at least the ones who lived). There are other excellent sea-faring peoples, so the I have to ask the sampling question again.
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And again I have to respond that you have selected a single data point from a large sampling process. By the same reasoning, one wonders how we justify the name of the planet Venus. Were there not also male gods? Were there not gods with other preoccupations apart from love? It's a ridiculously unrepresentative name; I reject it utterly.
Grant Hutchison