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[lojban] Re: round numbers
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 have
anything 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
jbitenfa
which 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 of
powers 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
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