Gene Selkov Aug 1, 2010:

an interesting slip of the pen Many thanks to everyone who supported and cheered this insanely risky proposition :)

Because it seems to be so interesting and even amusing, it makes me wonder: how bizarre does it sound to someone who was born with a Romance language?

I've done a goodle search for "mínimos cuadros" and found that it occurs rather more frequently than any mistyped version of "minimos quadrados". Both in Spanish and Portuguese. That is a bit strange, unless you can use "cuadro" as an adjective -- will you ever?

It is hard to think of something as a slip of the tongue if it does not sit well with the grammar.

Could it be a reverse translation? English is not a very rigrorous language; it is actually quite vague (and thus extremely efficient in some cases). It tolerates interconversion between nouns and adjectives unadorned by any grammatical signals. More rigorously, "least squares" should really read "least squareds".

So "mínimos cuadrados" is a sort of inverse of "least squares"; the English version alludes to mimising the squared values of something, while the Spanish version reads as "quadrature of the minima". Funny, isn't it?

MPGS Jul 31, 2010:

"mínimos cuadrados" = "least squares" :)

mary bowen (asker) Jul 31, 2010:

Mínimos cuadrados Great! Thank you for this! And now, how would you say mínimos cuadrados in English, please?

Gene Selkov Jul 31, 2010:

least squares It looks like a typo; shoud be "Mínimos cuadrados".