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

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.)

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.

(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.)

And kcasada said:

> I am told by them that know better (being BAD at decimals myself) that
> a
> number such as 9.54 would be written 9,54 (except that the comma is
> "backwards") and read "nine fasilah four and fifty" where "fasilah" is
> the
> word for the backwards comma. I then asked whether a person could
> actually say
> something closer to "fifty-four hundredths," and was told that you
> COULD say
> "fasilah four and fifty from a hundred" but "Nobody ever does that."
> Go figure. I love this language.
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.)

--
Tristan.

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