Re: "The" and possessives

J Matthew Pearson wrote:
>Irina Rempt wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 22 May 2001, Roger Mills wrote:
> >
> > > Just wondering-- is it a peculiarity of English (perhaps other
>Germanic?)
> > > that we count thousands by hundreds?  "nineteen hundred" "twenty-five
> > > hundred"etc.??
> >
> > Dutch has it, but that's also Germanic, of course.
> >
> > Valdyan has it too; it doesn't even *have* a word for "thousand",
> > it's _iranisin iran_ "hundreds ten".
>
>Tokana is the same.  One thousand is "tam kunma", or ten hundreds.  The
>power
>terms in Tokana are:
>
>   tam       ten
>   kunma     hundred (ten tens)
>   tolok     ten thousand (one hundred hundreds)
>
>Don't some east Asian languages work like this?
My conlang Tairezazh also has a similar system to this. "Thousand" is
_thelksád", lit "ten-hundred", while there's a underived word for "ten
thousand" - _tsfail_. The next power word 'd be "hundred million" (or rather
"ten thousand ten thousands"), but I'ven't introduced one yet. Still, I can
say "trafthel-trafksád-trafthel-traftsfail-trafthel-trafksád-trafthel-trav",
or 99.999.999.

                                                Andreas
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