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

Quoting Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>:

> On 12 Jan 2005, at 5.40 am, Ray Brown wrote:
>
> >>       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.
>
> Pretty please tell that to the Swedes! They insist on putting things
> like '3 cl' and '2,5 dl' even in the English sections of stuff I sell
> at the Sweden Shop at Ikea, and no-one here would have any idea what a
> decilitre was it jumped up at bit them! (OTOH, we use centimetres all
> the time and I think that Europeans don't, so we're not entirely
> without failure---I could be wrong here though.)
Surely you must've seen centimetres on IKEA products if you've seen deciletres?
It's the one of the commonest length units here - probably more common than the
metre itself. We use decimetres too, but not quite as frequently. Decilitres and
centilitres are of course quite common.

> But the point is there's metric prefixes for 10 (deka-/da), 100
> (hecto-/h), 1000 (kilo-/k), 10 000 (myria-/my), 1 000 000 (mega/M), and
> then they go up only in thousands, as well as 0.1 (deci-/d), 0.01
> (centi-/c) and 0.001 (milli-/m), before they go down in thousandths.
> That they go up/down in thousand(th)s at that point is probably no huge
> loss, I certainly don't hear 20 gigagrams or 120 zeptolitres very
> often.
I suppose the "extreme" multiple one hears alot of is picofarads.

> (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.)
Let's see. I was unaware of the *existence* of the myria- prefix. I've never
seen deka- except in lists of prefixes. Deci- and centi- are common with metre
and litre, but rarely if ever used with anything else. Hecto- is pretty much
restricted to hectogram (usually shortened to just 'hekto' - kilogram similarly
becomes 'kilo'), hectare, and hectolitre, altho you sometimes hear of
hectopascals too.

The really evil Swedish unit is the _mil_, or metric mile, of 10km. It's just
asking for evil mistranslations.

                                               Andreas

Replies