Subject: Re: [lojban] Normal

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 15:33:20 -0400

At 01:02 PM 06/22/2001 -0400, Pierre Abbat wrote:
>On Thu, 21 Jun 2001, John Cowan wrote:
> >Pierre Abbat scripsit:
> >
> >> Does {cnano} mean "norm" or "average"? How would you express "The average
> >> height of the river is normally two meters, but now it's six, and they 
> don't
> >> follow a normal distribution"?
> >
> >I think it can be applied to any measure of central tendency, and
> >then one can coin lujvo for mean, median, mode, etc.
>
>Okay, how about cafna'o for mode,

cafrai

> porna'o for median,

pormidju

>kajna'o for mean,

I'd use sujna'o; I think there is more than one kind of calculated mean. I 
suggest the above for the arithmetic mean, we'd need something else for the 
geometric mean.

>and na'orcu'o for the normal distribution?

It'd have to be na'orselcu'o or as you note below it will be an oblique place.

> The first three have x1, x2, x3 of
>cnano; na'orcu'o is less obvious:
>
>na'orcu'o: x1 is random under conditions x2, with normal distribution x3, with
>mean x4 and standard deviation x5

I rather doubt that you can get that from the lujvo place structure 
conventions %^); mathematicians would probably prefer the use of variance 
to standard deviation.

But the problem with this is that it ignores dozens of other random 
distributions that are NOT normal. (One of the listings I found under 
normal distribution using www.xrefer.com, my newly discovered site for all 
the things I've forgotten since college) indicates there are several dozen 
mathematical distributions with names. Of these, the Poisson/binomial 
distribution is the most well known to me which is random also. Looking at 
the definition of the normal distribution, mijna'omirtamra'i selcu'o would 
be more accurate if verbose (and I see no reason why the two parts have to 
be combined into a single word), but I would be inclined to just use cunrgauso.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org