[lojban] Re: round numbers

["Philip Newton" <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On 10/14/06, Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu> wrote:
> I looked up "round number" on Wikipedia. There's one interlanguage link, to
> Russian "круглые числа". "Вокруг" means "around" so that's no different. I
> went to "rounding" and found links to many Indo-European languages, all
> having some resemblance to "rotund" or "krug", Chinese and Korean which I
> can't read, and Hebrew "עיגול (פעולה)". "עיגול" redirects to "מעגל" which
> means "circle". ("עגל" means "calf"; I tried that first and found an article
> about the golden calf. Calves probably have no more to do with circles than
> plagues with words.)

The Japanese article seems to be at 端数処理 (which is linked to English
"rounding", but not vice-versa). The article title seems to translate
as "treatment of fractions".

Several different rounding methods are mentioned in the article,
including 切り捨て (kirisute, "cut and throw away", round down), 切り上げ
(kiriage, "cut and raise", round up), 四捨五入 (shisha-gonyuu, "four is
thrown away, five enters", round 0.5 and above up, the rest down),
五捨六入 (gosha-rokunyuu "five is thrown away, six enters", round 0.5 and
below down, the rest up), and 丸め (marume "to make round", which
appears to be round-to-even).

So one of the terms has to do with round shapes, while the others deal
with cutting and/or discarding.

mu'o mi'e .filip.
--