Re: Numbers in Qthen|gai (and in Tyl Sjok) [long]

Hi!

Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> writes:
> We also of course read figures like 1900 as nineteen hundred; 1524 as
> fifteen hundred (and) twenty four. We do not seem to do that with numbers
> greater than 1999. for example 2005 is two thousand (and) five.
Right I forgot that it is really more complicated. :-)  I think in Dutch,
years >= 2000 can also take the '... hundred and ...' form.

Funny.

> >       I wanted to make it reasonably easy to use Tyl Sjok regardly of
> >       your L1 system.
>
> A very valid point, and one which, I must confess, I had not considered.
> Most clearly it should be one of things that designers of auxlangs ought
> to consider - but IME so rarely do. Certainly it is something I must
> consider in reference to Bax and Brx.
Oh, nice to read this. :-) Actually, I was not aware of this until a)
learning Chinese and b) watching a Korean trying to say '5 million' in
English.  We were surprised that saying such a seemingly simple number
took so long for him -- he was obviously calculating. :-)

> Very neat! Tho as you remarked above, I do not know how appropriate and
> easy this would be for the non-mathematical  :)
Thanks.  I will have to test that, of course.  Actually, I *think*,
but have not tested, that it is easy, because it is not much different
from a normal system after having thought it through.

> > (I don't know whether there are
> > some that *systematically* reverse the whole sequence of digits
>
> Arabic - and I believe the Semitic languages generally. That is why
> although Arabic is written from right to left, the numerals appear to us
> occidentals to be written from left to right!
Oh, I wasn't aware of that!  That is indeed interesting, since I
started to dislike my L1's digit order for a strange reason: when
listing sequences of things (even numbers), we usually list them low
order to high order (because you will usually start with the first
item, not the last one), but in a number itself, the order is vice
versa: high exponent to low exponent.  I think this is the reason why
little endian and big endian issues exist in the first place: little
endian is list order and big endian is number order.

So I see that Arabic has list order for both, which is nice.

What about fractional decimals like 523.237 in Arabic?  What's the
digit order?

I will definitely have to think about this!

> >    520 = 2 10 5 2
> >
> > As you can see here, you need not give all digits at the end if they
> > are zeros.
>
> I wonder, however, the latter would be misunderstood by the
> non-mathematical.
I think that's no problem, since Chinese does that abbreviation on the
right of the number, too, so a natlang example exists :-):

   52    = wu shi er  (5 10 2)
   520   = wu bai er  (5 100 2)
   5200  = wu qian er (5 1000 2)
   52000 = wu wan er  (5 10000 2)

> > I hope you are still listening. :-)
>
> Certainly - it is great to have something on topic   :)
Pfew, I know it was a long posting...

> It is an interesting solution. Do you have any non-mathematical friends
> you test the system on?
I will have to, I suppose, yes.  The problem is that they are usually
not at all interested in experiments of this kind. :-) That's why the
list is such a relief.

> > To add a bit more, Tyl Sjok supports different basis as well.  The
> > smallest is 2 and the largest native base is 16.
>
> So good for computer geeks as well    ;)
Exactly. :-)))

> > Large Numbers
> > -------------
> >
> > For very large numbers, the system is recursively applied.  E.g.
> >
> > 5.000.000.000.000  is  10 1 2 10 5
> >
> > I.e. the exponent is 12, which is '10 1 2' and then this is put in
> > front of the base of 10 which is then multiplied by 5.
>
> Neat - but does it meet  '4) The system should feel appropriate and easy
> to normal speakers'?
This, I really don't know... :-)))

And while in normal decimal encoding, you'd hardly ever need a third
level of exponentiation, for binary, this is quite typically so -- you
need it from 16 = 2^2^2.  This is strange, of course, but that's for
geeks only anyway. :-)

BTW, there is a table of binary numbers somewhere ...(searching)...
hmm, not on my website, obviously.  And the PDF is newer that the
PostScript.  Interesting. ....(installing)...

The digit table is here:
   http://www.theiling.de/projects/s2/digits.ps.gz
   http://www.theiling.de/projects/s2/digits.pdf

And the other PostScript file is also recent now.  The units are on page 73:

   http://www.theiling.de/projects/s2/grammar2.ps.gz
   http://www.theiling.de/projects/s2/grammar2.pdf

> But it has given me much to think about and it is great to have something
> on topic  :)
Thanks!

**Henrik