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

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