Pierre Abbat wrote:
On Friday 13 October 2006 17:16, Dmitry wrote:I am quite against such idea. Even if all the languages use the same (or similar) words both for describing numerical and geometrical roundness, it will not be a reason to use cukla namcu, because such suggestion will be against of ideas of Lojban. {cukla namcu} should mean "number of round/circular type".We have {xarna'u}, which is a similar calque.
That somebody did something unlojbanic before doesn't make it right to do it again. The correct thing is to dump xarna'u and do better.
Lojban does not have the same roots as natural languages, nor the same rules for compounding. We aren't, and more importantly shouldn't be limited to the horrible metaphors of people with languages not intentionally designed for enlarging the lexicon through compounding.
> i is no more a product of
imagination than the fifth root of 2 or a googolplex, nor does it haveanything more to do with imagination than with health (I briefly toyed with the idea of calling them {ka'orna'u}, misusing the cmavo as a rafsi).
The proper way to do that would be to do it in fu'ivla space, rather than trying to make rafsi that aren't.
Complex numbers have two components, and are sometimes represented using planar coordinates. How about relcimdyna'u
For me, it sounds like another name for {pai}, (3.141529...), number, that is definitely much more related to circles, than 0,10,20,.... My proposal for "round number" is pilji be li pano Ewww, that's 2 syllables longer than {cukla namcu}. But it much more reflects the nature of round number, doesn't it?
There is no requirement that lujvo have only two components, nor that they have few syllables, especially for an esoteric word used only in very limited fields. I would go so far as to say that it is unLojbanic to do so. Zipf's law says that COMMON words tend to be short, and uncommon words are LONG. I cannot imagine a language where a word for "complex numbers" or "round numbers" is such a common concept deserving to be a single short word.
(That I have become somewhat of an aficionado of Russian, which has no qualms about using 4 syllable words for relatively common words makes me even more militant against the tendency to try to make all concepts two-part lujvo of minimal syllables.)
A number that's round in another base (e.g. 1458, which is round in base 3) is usually not a multiple of 10, and a large enough multiple of 10 (e.g. 335543930) isn't round.
Now you seem to be talking about a different sense of round number. I think we have two concepts. One is the number you get by rounding off, which need not be a power of 10, and is the meaning I think Nora was referring to. You are talking about numbers that are integral exponents of base 10, which using your reasoning could be integral exponents of base n, where n is one of the places.
Now, technically, you don't need a lujvo. Your clarification fits precisely the x1 of tenfa (you could be pedantic and say that it is nalfrinytenfa).
tenfyjbina'u or even jbitenfawhich is semantically looser but is still implicitly a number with the right places implied by jvojva if not in the ideal order (x1 of tenfa being the exponentially rounded number, x2 being the base, x3 being the order of magnitude, x4 being the number rounded; tenfa alone doesn't have the x4) This has the advantage of giving us multiple useful lujvo from one tanru, since terjbitenfa - "order of magnitude" is at least as worthy of a lujvo as "exponentially rounded number".
Of course, having identified that you mean round numbers in the sense ofpowers of ten, we have a different reason why these are called "round" numbers
cuklerna'u has some limited virtue for the concept But I prefer jbitenfa because of the useful self-evident place structure lojbab