Take a crack at this: 1. What is the lowest and highest head count number of people making up a few? 2. What is the lowest and highest head count number of people making up some? 3. What is the lowest and highest head count number of people making up many?
On hand, I say 3 is few, 4-5 is some, 6-7 is several, 8-10 is many. I'm using on my hands. Outside of hands, 8 or more would be many.
to me these concepts are not edge defined. that that is the important part of their definition, the one i use for them, that they are not. a few may be less then or equal to some, but is never greater then many. few and some are a minority, a relatively small one. many may be either a majority, or if a minority a large one and a larger one then some or few. there's no direct numerica equivalent. they are simply fuzzy edged proportions, but they are related to each other by being more and less as the case may be.
well, they all depend on context. and there's a huge amount of variability possible in each one. generally: 3 ≤ a few < infinity 2 ≤ some ≤ infinity 1< many ≤ infinity
few < some < many < most < (well i don't think you will find very many anythings that are all. not saying can't. just not often nor likely) if an event happens a million times a second (that's only a frequency of one megacycle) a one in a million variation within it, still means it happens on average at least once every second. we do live in a statistical universe though. a universe of more often and less often. not one of always and never.
I don't know about that. I'm single. But this morning there was a hot babe lying next to me in my bed. We're definitely not a couple. So I really don't know about that.
my parents, when i was growing up, used the therm "a couple" interchangably with "a few", as in "i'm going to the store to get a couple of things", which almost never meant exactly two. so i never really associated it with having to mean exactly two either. now a pair i think of as exactly two, (unless its a pear, but you could still have a pair of pears), but with another more special property then just being two of something. a pair i generally think of as two things that are a mirror image of each other, reversed in relation to each other, along some imaganary, non-physical, line of semitry.
