Using Lojban in 'very' defined contexts (eg. maths)

[M.Nael]

Would this work?

My native language is Arabic yet I've studied Mathematics since age 3 in English... Arabic has the disadvantage of having 'too-many syllables' as opposed to (usually) 1-2 in English.

This is most visible in numbers. Arabic 'One' is 'wa?id' | 'Two' is 'i0na:n' | 'Three' is '0la:0ah' and so on.

Even with English being more efficient here (and I've grown to use its number-words in mental calculation), I still find myself saying 'three-thousand bla-bla-hundred), ...etc. Lojban number-words should make up for this, thus:

My question is: how much would training for 'pa-ci-re' instead of 'one-hundred, thirty-two' etc... be beneficial for my mental calculations? And if I decided to extend this to the whole of my mathematical thinking?

Has anyone tried to use just the maths (and generally science-part) of Lojban?

[Escape Landsome]

This is a good question.

I wonder if "pa-ci-re" is an efficient way to say "132". It may be
good for a computer, which "understands" the things in a syntactic
way, but I would say that humans prefer the semantic-pragmatic way
which is found in "one-hundred, three-tens, two-units", (even if tens
is said "-ty" and units is implicit), because there's the positional
meaning of 1 that means "one hundred" imported in the language.

People tend to think pragmatically/semantically, not only along
syntax, as, perhaps, Lojban does a little too much ?

2012/3/2, M.Nael <muhamm...@gmail.com>:

> Has anyone tried to use *just* the maths (and generally science-part) of
> Lojban?
>
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[MorphemeAddict]

This has sort of come up before. I agree that bare numerals seem harder to use than numbers that mark the value at each place. When I was in the army (too few years ago) a man once directed us in physical training exercises saying "one five" for 15. I found it irritating. 

What do the accomplished speakers here think? 

stevo

[.arpis.]

From my meager experience, the lojban system is nicer than English for
thinking of _numbers_, as long as _quantity_ doesn't matter. That's
okay, though, because any digit based system is poor at expressing
quantity at scale.

ba zu ju'o cu'i I would like to practice using lojban numbers for a
memory system (inspired by
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system) and practice
using them for arithmetic.

--
mu'o mi'e .arpis.

[Sebastian Fröjd]

I've been studying some psychology and there has been some research in recent years which supports the saphir-whorf hypothesis. For example the fact that chinese children grasp the base-10 position system several years earlier than english-speaking children (approx 5 year instead of 8 year). The cause for this seems to be the chinese numeral systems which is pretty much the same as lojban.
To say pareci really is easier than to say onehundred and twentythree, and if you think otherwise it's probably because you has not get used to it yet.

mu'omi'e jongausib

>> --
> mu'o mi'e .arpis.
>

[Escape Landsome]

Are you sure the Chinese system is like Lojban ?

From what I know of the chinese language, 523 is said :

5 100 2 10 3 in Chinese.

520 is said :

5 100 2 10

500 is said :

5 100

506 is said :

5 100 6 or if you want 5 100 0 10 6

And there are subdivisions by powers of 10000 (not 1000)

[.arpis.]

e'o Citation for said research for the interested?

[MorphemeAddict]

This is how I understand Chinese numbers, too. However, years in Chinese are simply read as a sequence of numerals: 2000 = er ling ling ling. (Always sounds fun to me.) 

stevo

[Muhammad an-Nuqrashi]

I've read a bit in Mandarin and its sisters but I never got as far as numerals; mostly stopped at the Wikipedia page!

+Sebastian, I'd really, really^99, love to see a paper about that research. I've been fascinated with SW-H until they left me no evidence it could exist... If the research is 'that' positive, I might take out a few old projects from my safe!

 

From my meager experience, the lojban system is nicer than English for
thinking of _numbers_, as long as _quantity_ doesn't matter. That's
okay, though, because any digit based system is poor at expressing
quantity at scale.

+.arpis. , So that's a 'go-for-it' recommendation?

PS. I'm sorry for late replies, those I've made and those yet to come, but my connection is quite unstable >.<

[Sebastian Fröjd]

I've been trying to find the reference of what I've been reading, but I haven't found it yet. From what I remember, it was something about chinese count like eight-nine-ten-tenone-tentwo etc, instead of the illogical eleven-twelve etc. So that could be the cause why chinese children grasp the base-10 position system earlier. Unfortunately I have no reference to this research at the moment. But maybe this could be a start?:

"Other experiments have demonstrated differences in how Westerners and East Asians think about objects (Iwao & Gentner, 1997), numbers (Lucy & Gaskins, 1997), and space (Levinson, 1996) and how processing numbers when doing arithmetic problems is related to language differences between Chinese-speaking and English-speaking participants (Tang et al., 2006)"

mu'omi'e jongausib

2012/3/3 Muhammad an-Nuqrashi <muhamm...@gmail.com>

--

[MorphemeAddict]

I would say that you should try it if you want to. Even if there is research to the contrary, it could still be an interesting personal experiment/experience. 

stevo

--

[Escape Landsome]

I heard something similar about calculation abilities of young
Japanese children : as they use the pattern 4 100 3 10 2 to say "432",
they are good in maths and more able than english children who must
think and compute "thirty" instead of "three tens".

Also, one say I passed IQ tests or something like that and there was a
test where numbers of three and four digits appeared on a screen like
flash and one had to tell if two consecutive numbers were the same or
different.

And I had good results because I coded internally (in my mind) "1234"
as "one-two-three-four", and not as "one thousand two hundreds
thirty-four".

So, for this kind of task, i.e. identifying a sequence, a strictly
digital approach is good. But to compute quantities and have a good
insight of their meaning, "one thousand two hundreds and so on" is the
right approach...

[Besides, it was also proved that people whose language has
monosyllabic words for the digits were better at this kind of test,
for prosodic and mnemonic obvious reasons]

[Wang Xuerui]

2012/3/3 Sebastian Fröjd <so.co...@gmail.com>:

> I've been trying to find the reference of what I've been reading, but I
> haven't found it yet. From what I remember, it was something about chinese
> count like eight-nine-ten-tenone-tentwo etc, instead of the illogical
> eleven-twelve etc. So that could be the cause why chinese children grasp the
> base-10 position system earlier. Unfortunately I have no reference to this
> research at the moment. But maybe this could be a start?:
>

Chinese numeral expressions are mostly regular... in the "ten-one,
ten-two" situation the leading "one"s are omitted, and for large
numbers it is sometimes acceptable to just say the individual digits;
i remember having said something like "the file size is five four
three two eight zero six bytes" for my classmate to verify the
transferred data. And ordinals are formed by simply prefixing
cardinals.

Maybe the irregularities lie in alternative counting symbols like the
ancient Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches... actually not many
Chinese people can enumerate all of the characters, let alone writing
down them :P

[MorphemeAddict]

On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 10:03 AM, Wang Xuerui <idontk...@gmail.com> wrote:

2012/3/3 Sebastian Fröjd <so.co...@gmail.com>:

> I've been trying to find the reference of what I've been reading, but I
> haven't found it yet. From what I remember, it was something about chinese
> count like eight-nine-ten-tenone-tentwo etc, instead of the illogical
> eleven-twelve etc. So that could be the cause why chinese children grasp the
> base-10 position system earlier. Unfortunately I have no reference to this
> research at the moment. But maybe this could be a start?:
>

Chinese numeral expressions are mostly regular... in the "ten-one,
ten-two" situation the leading "one"s are omitted, and for large
numbers it is sometimes acceptable to just say the individual digits;
i remember having said something like "the file size is five four
three two eight zero six bytes" for my classmate to verify the
transferred data.

That sounds pretty normal to me. It's like 'spelling' a number to verify it. Phone numbers are read the same way. 

stevo

And ordinals are formed by simply prefixing
cardinals.

Maybe the irregularities lie in alternative counting symbols like the
ancient Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches... actually not many
Chinese people can enumerate all of the characters, let alone writing
down them :P

[Escape Landsome]

> That sounds pretty normal to me. It's like 'spelling' a number to verify
> it. Phone numbers are read the same way.

I think that's two very different things.

When you read a phone number or register a room number, or even give a
year, you give a MNEMONIC. Saying nineteen-o-three or six-three-one
or saying a phone number in any of the numerous ways to segment it
(not forgetting the "normal numeral" way) : you just say some numeric
value which is used as a *menmonic* but FOO-BAR-THINGEY would do as
well as THREE-TWO-ONE.

That's also why you can use Heavenly Stems, which are a cyclic system
of patterns that emulate small integers.

But when you want to speak of a QUANTITY, it becoms important to tell
if some digit indicates a DOZEN, a HUNDRED, a TERABYTE, and so on.
*Weight* becomes an essential notion. At least, it renders the
imagination of what the number means more easy to build up. 234 is 2
hundreds plus 3 tens plus 4 units, and 200 is simply 2 hundreds, so
you can sum 200 + 300 by thinking "2 + 3" hundreds, and then, act as
if "HUNDRED" was a mere noun.

(By the way, it's the same reason in fraction, there is a denominator
and a numerator. TWO THIRDS is two things of the same kind, namely
"thirds". The demoninator "third" encapsulates the denomination of
this kind. The numerator numbers it, that is, it says there are two
of the kind)

.

So, let's not confuse MNEMONICS and QUANTITIES.

[Sid]

doi la'oi Fröjd

English uses eleven and twelve because it's base-12, not base-10.

doi lai ry Muhammad an-Nuqrashi ry

Sapir-Whorf has two variants -- one is whether language *limits* what
you can think, and the other is if language merely influences how you
think. The former is near completely disproven, the latter is fairly
well accepted.

mi'e cntr

[John E Clifford]

Nope, decimal.  "Eleven" and "twelve" just mean "one over" and "two over" -- over ten, of course

SWH is notoriously ill-defined and most of the formulations miss crucial parts of the original.  That being said, the summation of acceptance is about right.

---

From: Sid <cntra...@gmail.com>
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Monday, March 5, 2012 6:14 AM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Using Lojban in 'very' defined contexts (eg. maths)

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[Sid]

"Eleven" and "twelve" come from Proto-Germanic *ainlif and *twalif,
which are in turn derived from phrases that were literally "one left"
and "two left". But, yeah, I goofed; English has special words for 11
and 12 because its ancestors were duodecimal, but it's not fully
duodecimal today.

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[MorphemeAddict]

English is not duodecimal at all today. Nor was it in the past. Despite all the words like 'dozen', 'gross'. 

stevo

[John E Clifford]

Well, I don't read the PG that way, but rather as the result of taking away ten, the base.  Dozens are about the only duodecimal thing left in any Germanic culture and those persist in America for non-numerical reasons.

---

From: Sid <cntra...@gmail.com>
To: loj...@googlegroups.com

Sent: Monday, March 5, 2012 9:57 AM

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[Muhammad an-Nuqrashi]

Well, I can't say anything right now but I'm giving it a try anyway... I'll keep you posted as I could.

[Pierre Abbat]

On Monday, March 05, 2012 07:14:17 Sid wrote:
> doi la'oi Fr�jd

>
> English uses eleven and twelve because it's base-12, not base-10.

Proto-Germanic may have had alternating bases 12 and 10, but all modern
Germanic languages are strictly decimal, and "eleven" and "twelve" are just
leftovers of PGmc usage.

Some Italo-Western Romance languages switch between sixteen and seventeen,
others between fifteen and sixteen. Neither is what Latin did; Latin counted up
to septendecim, then backward to viginti. Sometimes, for fun, I count in
Spanish as one did in Latin: once, doce, trece, catorce, quince, sece,
setence, dosdeveinte, undeveinte, veinte.

Pierre
--
The Black Garden on the Mountain is not on the Black Mountain.

[Escape Landsome]

This discussion about 11 and 12 is a diversion from the main subject.

The main topic has to do with the way we represent numbers.

Numbers can work either as a MNEMONIC (in which case, one-two-three is
just the same kind of thing as A-B-C, foo-bar-foobar, or A-3-foobar)
or as a QUANTITY

The important thing with QUANTITY is that they are the compound of a
NUMBER with a MAGNITUDE, that is, in two thousands, it's either 2000
either 2 x (unit = a thousand).

This has to do with what the French call "chiffres significatifs"
(meaningful digits ?)

In the number 2700, 2 and 7 are meaningful digits, but 7 is less
meaningful than 2, because it imports some precision whereas 2
indicates the big number.

The 0s are not meaningful at all, as can be seen if we get another
unit in base 10 : 2700 = 27 x 100 = 2,7 x 10^3, and so on.

In the process of MEANING in a QUANTITY, it is mandatory to
distinguish meaningful numbers from meaningless ones. Speaking of
2300 as 2 thousands 3 hundreds carries the meaning that it is in fact
2 x 10^3 + 3 x 10^2, which does not exist in the lojbanic way of
numerating...

This is important, because 2000 + 1000 can be viewed either as 2000 +
1000 or as 2 thousands + 1 thousand, which is isomorphic to 2 apples +
1 apple

QUANTITIES are the converse form of QUALITY, that is, 2100 come
naturally with "apples" or "dollars" or "Newtons"... And in the
concept of Quality, the unit takes place, thus : "kilo-", "Mega-",
"Giga-", "Tera-" which are just another way to say powers of tens.

This is not required at all for MNEMONIC. The name of a room, of a
computer, of a login, or even of a year, is a mnemonic, and thus, can
be registered through a simple sequence of digits, --- which
QUANTITIES are not fit for.

[Muhammad an-Nuqrashi]

This's my last post here for the interested;

I'm leaving Lojban sometime soon in order to focus on other projects including school and a conlang. I've already been working for sometime on a Lojban ‹› Arabic dictionary so I think I'll finish as much of that as I could before leaving...

I've been a long-time believer in SW-h although I don't quite get what the original notion was like. I, however, find it markedly easier to think in images about abstracts to which I have no linguistic abilities... That stands true for stories and memories complex enough that language would hinder their flow. However, once I get the hang of language for these situations, I completely switch auditory, making everything slower. I've been recently trying to force myself to think visual as much as I could but it's been stressing my WM and school-schedule!

With that, I'm already working on a conlang specific for use with mathematics; that's aside from Renodre I've been working on for the story ;)

I'll keep you posted on how it all goes with me and maths...

››MN

[MorphemeAddict]

I totally agree, which is why I asked about this a couple of years ago. When I found the exponential cmavo, it ceased to be a concern, since I could always attach the magnitude to the bare digits. 

stevo

[MorphemeAddict]

Have you heard of Numaudo? It's essentially a way to read math. I haven't been able to find much about it though. 

stevo 

 

I'll keep you posted on how it all goes with me and maths...

››MN

--

[Michael Turniansky]

Weirdly, I already use the the Major system (although I've always
referred to it as Harry Lorayne's system, since that's where I first
read of it 35+ years ago, and have used it in English all these years)
in lojban, but just for inconsequential things. For example, my
address is "ro datni" I also noted with some amusement that many
digits can transform into other lojban digits. For example, want to
remember "2946837090"? Why, simply remember the lojban phrase "no pa
re ci vo mu xa ze bi so" ;-)

(Incidentally, my 8yo's 4th grade class (Jewish day school) was
also taught this system for memorizing what was the main part of each
chapter of Genesis)

--gejyspa

[Jonathan Jones]

How is 2946837090 0123456789?

mu'o mi'e .aionys.

.i.e'ucai ko cmima lo pilno be denpa bu .i doi.luk. mi patfu do zo'o
(Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )

[Michael Turniansky]

Read the link that arpis provided (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system ) for
enlightenment.
--gejyspa