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

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 12, 2005, 15:44
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

Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>Units (Was: Numbers in Qthen|gai (and in Tyl Sjok) [long])
Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>Units (was Re: Numbers in Qthen|gai (and in Tyl Sjok) [long])