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

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 12, 2005, 3:17
On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 11:35:39AM +1100, Tristan McLeay wrote:
> But the point is there's metric prefixes for 10 (deka-/da), 100 > (hecto-/h), 1000 (kilo-/k), 10 000 (myria-/my)
But note that my- is not part of the SI system of prefixes.
> (OTOH, I don't think I've ever heard myria- or deka- being used, and > hecto- only in hectopascals (merely a modernisation of the old > millibar) and hectares. In Oz, centi-'s only used in centimetres (that > I can think of), and deci- isn't used at all, excepting, of course, in > European imports.)
Well, we don't have much truck with the metric system over here in the US, but even so I've heard both dekameter and decimeter - though the latter seems to pop up mostly when someone is explaining how big a liter is. I don't know why we don't use the other prefixes more. For example, it seems like decigrams would be a convenient unit for medical dosages, which frequently are given as some whole number of hundreds of milligrams. Of course, there are smaller dosages, like 20 mg per tablet or whatever, and expecting people to do math with order of magnitude differences is asking too much of the common person on the street, at least here - especially when safety is a concern.
> Well, if you'd asked me, I would've said no-one read '9.54' as anything > but nine-point-five-four (in English), and it would never've occurred > to me to ask about the fifty-four hundredths use---is this something > you normally do in English? (Saying nine-point-fifty-four was the sort > of thing my grade five teacher told us off for all the time.)
I would tend to read 9.54 as "nine point fifty-four", unless dictating to someone who was transcribing, in which case I'd say "nine point five four". I wouldn't usually say "nine and fifty-four hundredths". I might say "nine and twenty-seven fiftieths" just to be different. But by far my most likely reading other than the "nine point" ones would be "just over nine and a half". -Marcos