Re: Types of numerals; bases in natlangs.

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

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