Re: Types of numerals; bases in natlangs.

Quoting Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>:

> Thomas Hart Chappell wrote:
> > I was inspired by words like decillion and centillion and so on to wonder
> > why English's and other Standard Averge European languages' systems use
> ten-
> > to-the-sixth instead of ten-to-the-tenth.  If the base of the system is
> > ten, it would seem that the exponents in powers of the base should also be
> > expressed in base-ten.  I wondered why there are words for thousand and
> > million, instead of words for hundred (10^2) and lakh (10^5)and 10^10,
> > whatever that is, and so on up to googol (10^100).
>
> My guess is that 10^10 is such a high number that there's no need to
> make a special term for it.  Western languages seem to have gone up to
> either 10^3 or 10^4 historically, with higher numbers being created with
> multiples of those.  E.g., "a thousand thousand" or "a hundred myriad"
> for 10^6.  Million was formed from the Latin _mil_ (via Italian, if I
> recall correctly).  When larger numbers were necessary, they followed
> the same pattern of threes.
>
> The Chinese, on the other hand, had gone up to 10^4.  Larger numbers
> were therefore based on fours.
>
> Actually, historically it was more complicated.  According to Wikipedia,
> there were historically 4 different systems of values for the large
> numbers.  One in which each subsequent number was 10^4 times higher than
> the previous (the modern system), one which had increments of 10^8, one
> which had increments of 10, and one in which each was the *square* of
> the previous.  Thus, the values of each number in the four systems:
>
> Yi    10^8   10^8   10^5   10^8
> Zhao  10^12  10^16  10^6   10^16
> Jing  10^16  10^24  10^7   10^32
> Gai   10^20  10^32  10^8   10^64
> Zi    10^24  10^40  10^9   10^128
> Rai   10^28  10^48  10^10  10^256
Cool! The square system is basically what I invented for Tairezazh:

dza     10^0
thel    10^1
ksád    10^2
tsfail  10^4
gzhour  10^8

Not invented names for higher numbers yet, but it would go 10^16, 10^32 ...

                                                   Andreas