Re: CHAT: Measurements (was: Re: CHAT: browsers)

Nik scrub:
> Jake X wrote:
> > _hyaku sen_  is a hundred thousend.  You men hyaku man. :)
>
> Oops.  of course.  :-)  And "hundred thousand" is actually _juu man_
> (ten ten-thousand)
It's always been very hard for me to get out of the morphemes of our
linguistic number system.  The farthest away I have ever gotten was learning
to write the Akkadian number system (which I have since forgotten from loss
of interest and lack of use), which uses base sixty with a subbase ten
(I think I remember enough to describe the way it works, if not the symbols,
which
are very regular and I should remember).  If anyone is interested, I'll
describe it
in my next post.
It also interests me how the form of spoken numbers is so deeply entwined in
the
written numerical form, e.g. three digit "periods" etc.  When I learned
Akkadian
numbers, even though I could convert to and from base ten, I could only
think of
the number in terms of either decimal numbers or the equivalent decimal
reading
of the same digits.  Maybe if I spoke a language based on a different base,
I would
be more equipped to handle it mentally, but acquiring the system and
converting
with my L1 would be very difficult.

Jake

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