Pierre Abbat wrote:
Complex numbers are not used everywhere, but by no means are they esoteric.
We will have to agree to disagree. Just as integral and derivative are mathematical jargon that probably belong in fu'ivla space, so do most other mathematical terms. I put a few of the most common into gismu space, and was ever criticized for it. I put a few more into cmavo space, and at the time, I figured that the most likely way to refer to those operations would be using the cmavo nu'a. Leave mathematical stuff in MEX where it was designed to be.
I lost sympathy with the idea of concocting lujvo for scientific and mathematical and computer terms when I saw that this was in fact what most of the the first year of Loglan's journal TL consisted of - people coming up with sets of lujvo to cover the esoteric terminology of some field. No one ever actually used these words - they were invented and took up space in word lists, and incidentally conveyed to the world looking at those word lists that Loglan was a language solely intended for geeks.
Elliptic curve groups and p-adic numbers are esoteric. And round numbers and rounding are used by everyone - if you see at the store a 527-gram box of pasta for $2.37 and compute the number of cents per gram, you will round it.
That is a verb. It refers to a specific kind of approximation. Other kinds include truncation, and the floor and ceiling functions.
The result of "rounding" will not necessarily be a "round number". Indeed, the example you give does not result in a "round number". "Rounding" to the nearest cent per gram gives zero, and no non-mathematician would do that. Of course no non-geek would be calculating the number of cents per gram. Most people are too innumerate; a small number will *compare* unit prices if someone already has calculated them; most will not calculate them if they aren't already presented as such (note that the term people use is NOT "round number" but "unit price" in such instances)
You can argue that the operation of rounding results in a "rounded number", but that is a different concept from a "round" number, and again tied to that specific type of approximation represented by the verb "round", with places for the number of significant figures, the base, and the unrounded and rounded numbers.
And it has NOTHING to do with "cukla".
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.No I am not. I am talking about numbers whose prime factors are all 2, 3, 5, and maybe 7.
I have no idea why those prime factors are at all interesting. The only things I typically round to are powers of ten, though I personally will use halves, thirds, and fourths as "rounded" fractions in very limited circumstances with numbers between zero and one. But I don't think that the man on the street does, and I wouldn't try designing into Lojban something that fits my personal preferences.
It's a relative term; one number is more round than another, but I don't divide the numbers into the round and the unround. I've invented an unroundness metric; 2048 is about as round as 10. 864 and 540 are also round.
Well you have invented something entirely esoteric that has nothing to do with what someone does in the store (maybe YOU can relate your concept to what they are doing, but the person in the store will attach NO significance to 864 or 2048)
You are succumbing to a temptation to systematize and reform things that people have not in practice systematized, at least not in the way that you've come up with. I did the same thing in my original form of Lojban time of day, using base 12. It was elegant, eminently logical, and the community told me where to shove it, with good reason. Lojban already has enough novel concepts that we don't need to add any more.
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