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

On Monday, January 10, 2005, at 08:10 , Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 06:54:37PM +0000, Ray Brown wrote:
>> 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'.
>
> I disagree.  I would say "we're twenty-three hundred feet up" as readily
> as I would say "we're thirteen hundred feet up".  But the inclusion of
> the word "hundred" makes *both* examples different from year numbers;
I think we will find usage varies across the whole wide anglophone areas.
The point is that we do not have a single 'neat' way of handling numbers
from 1000 to 9999 - usage various on context and, almost certainly,
dialect and idiolect.

I think I will leave it at that, before this turns into yet another
English dialect thread   ;)
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On Monday, January 10, 2005, at 05:40 , Henrik Theiling wrote:

[snip]
> As I now know that some natlangs really reverse the whole digit
> stream, I might try to optimise my system further (optimising = coming
> closer to my internal ideal, whatever that is :-)).
It appears I was mistaken about this - half-remembering things and knowing
that in Arabic the number strings are written from lowest to highest in
the direction of reading.

Maybe, there should another 'Universal' to add to Greenberg's list   :)
"While in numbers from 11 to 99, a language may express the units may be
before the tens or after the tens or allow both positions, the higher
powers of 10 (i.e. 100, 1000, 10000 etc) are always expressed from highest
to lowest before the tens & unit combination."

In fact, making a Universal is a sure way of making it certain there will
be an exception  :-)

(Is there any Greenberg Universal for which there is not some natlang
exception?)
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I've been thinking about this again:

On Saturday, January 8, 2005, at 09:56 , Henrik Theiling wrote:
[snip]
>       In Chinese, Korean and Japanese, however, the major structuring
>       uses *four* digits instead of *three* in English.  So there is
>       a word for 10 (shi), 100 (bai), 1000 (quan), 10000 (wan), and then
>       100000 is encoded as '10 10000' (shi wan).  And 1 million
>       is '100 10000' (bai wan).
>
In ancient Greek there is a word for 10 (deka), 100 (hekaton), 1000
(khilia), 10000 (myria), and then
100000 is encoded as '10 10000' (dekakis myria '10 times 10000').  And 1
million is '100 10000' (hekatontakis myria '100 times 10000).

Note:
- deka and hekaton are indeclinable.
- khilia and myria are both declinable adjective, agreeing with the nouns
they qualify; I have given the neuter forms.
- instead of _dekakis myria_ and _hekatontakis myria_ one could have _deka
myriades_ (10 myriads) and _hekaton myriades_ (100 myriads) followed by
the noun in the genitive plural.

>       Therefore, it is quite hard to translate large numbers from
>       Chinese to English and vice versa.
I cannot help feeling it is a pity our western systems are based on the
Latin practice and not the ancient Greek practice. But Latinate 'thousand
based' system is now enshrined in the SI metric prefixes.

Ray
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ray.brown@freeuk.com
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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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