Nahuatl names and natality in aztec empire
Davius Sanctex
davius_sanctex at hotmail.com
Sat Dec 30 00:11:19 UTC 2000
A nice mathematical argument relating name "Teyacapan"
to average number for children in Aztec Empire.
____________________________
Bob McCaa points that in a census of 1540 in a group
of 1205 women, 313 were named "Teyacapan" (= first
born), i.e. 25,04%:
http:/www.umt.edu/history/nahuatl/names.html
I will show that these data implies
that the average number per family was at most 5,135
and that 6,88% of couples had not any child!
_________________________________________
This number can be related to the average number of
children in a family. We assume:
1) Nearly all first born female babies was named
"Teyacapan"
2) The probability of borns by unit of time remain
uniform for a community and population is stationary.
First step:
Second hypothesis implies borns can be well modelized by
a Poisson distribution, thus the probability of a couple
to have k kids is P(k):
P(k)= exp(-m)*(m^k)/k!
[Where m is the average number of children]
Second step:
Thus if the probability of a child to belong to a familiy
with exactly k kids is p(k):
p(k) = P(k)/(1-P(0))
[p(0) is the % of families that have no kid].
Thirst step:
If we take a woman at random the probability of being the
first kid in a family of k kids is just 1/k [= q(k)].
And thus the probability that a woman to be the first baby
of a family is r:
r = p(1)*q(1) + p(2)*q(2) + ...+ p(k)*q(k) + ... =
= P(1)/1 + p(2)/2 + ...+ p(k)/k + ... = 25,04%
This last equation enable us to evaluate m. For m = 5,135
k P(k) p(k) p(k)/k
0 0,00588 __
1 0,03022 0,03039 0,03039
2 0,07759 0,07805 0,03902
3 0,13282 0,13361 0,04453
4 0,17053 0,17154 0,04288
5 0,17515 0,17618 0,03523
6 0,14991 0,15079 0,02513
7 0,10997 0,11063 0,01580
8 0,07059 0,07101 0,00887
9 0,04028 0,04052 0,00450
sum 0,2498 = 24,98%
This shows that the average number must be of order 5,135.
Moreover, of this table we deduce that 5,88 % = P(0) of
couples have not babies and the majority (17,51%) have 5
babies. The number of families with 9 is 4,02% ...
_________________________________________________________________________
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