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

On Sunday, January 9, 2005, at 10:21 , Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 07:46:14PM +0000, Ray Brown wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I think that is the proximity to 2000, not the fact that it's greater
> than 1999.  Saying "twenty-oh-five" feels awkward, but I'm sure that 5
> years
> from now will be "twenty-ten".  Remember Pendleton Brown and Bearface?
> "In the year twenty-five twenty-five."
I wasn't thinking just of year dates. We would say of a place that it was
thirteen hundred (and) sixty four feet above see level; IME it is unusual
to use the form 'one thousand, three hundred (and) sixty four feet'. But I
think 'twenty three hundred (and) thirty five' is rather less likely than
'two thousand, three hundred (and) thirty five'.

It may well be that as we progress into the 21st century habits will
change with giving year dates and that this will affect our habits in
giving other measurements also.
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On Sunday, January 9, 2005, at 10:22 , Henrik Theiling wrote:

> Hi!
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. :-)
Things have a habit of being so  :)

> I think in Dutch,
> years >= 2000 can also take the '... hundred and ...' form.
This will probably become more common in English - see above.

> 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. :-)
I suppose he might. I wonder how Chinese, Japanese & Koreans cope with SI
measurements as the prefixes (kilo, mega, giga, tera etc are based on the
occidental three-digit structure.

[snip]
>>> (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.
Indeed so. Often when I was programming I wished we wrote our numbers the
other way round to ease formating of output.

[snip]
> 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 don't know. The western arabs (north Africa west of Libya) normally use
our Europeanized version of Arabic numbers. I imagine they would then
write 523,237 using the French comma rather than our point. But what
happens with the traditional Arabic numerals, I do not know.

>
>>> 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 :-):
Yes, it does - I had forgotten that   :)

[snip]
>> 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.
I know! But they needn't know its a conlang. As far they are concerned it
is a experimental method of number notation.


Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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