Re: Numbers ancient & modern (was: Unilang report)

I never noticed "half a thousand" in Ringworld, which rather a striking
phrasing, but "half a hundred" seems to be common usage in a certain genre
of fluffy medieval fantasy novel.  It seems it's preferable to use fractions
of large round numbers or multiple scores and dozens, rather than to use the
ungraceful formations of the multiples of ten.

A question:  What makes phrasing beautiful?  What is it about the following
passage that's so blindingly elegant?

"They finished _A Wanderer's Tale_ the next morning and moved on to
_Corridor of Fire_, a stately and tragic story of one man's slow
dissipation.  This had never come Nolan's way, either, and he found the
subject both depressing and distasteful, but the language was so beautiful
that he kept pausing at the end of sentences just to recover from the
intoxication of the words."

From Sharon Shinn's _Heart of Gold_.

Oo, and some conlang poetry, in response to Adrian's Gzarondin lament:

Nut orrid dzanv kîrrisûk,
Nu tsan.n.e dainionôlìì,
Nut nul orridde saraxalìì,
Nu dzanv lauanî tiras.a.

This is pretty translatable, in contrast to the Gzarondin:

My heart is mad with pain,
I will never see her* again,
My love will never speak to me again,
I am blinded by agony.

I get to use all sorts of fun grammar bits, like the never tense.
Circumflexes are long, graves nasal.  Consonants look like IPA except for
the . which denotes retroflexion, and (x) which is /S/.  Interestingly, this
follows a neat syllable quantity pattern of 10/11/10/11, where a short vowel
without consonant clusters is 1 count, and a long vowel, diphthong, or
consonant cluster raises the syllable's quantity to 2.  I didn't even plan
it like that.
*: Not necessarily "her", but any person who the speaker believes is greatly
superior in stature to himself.

---
Shreyas