Re: The English/French counting system (WAS: number systemsfromconlangs)

"Mark J. Reed" wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 08:57:35AM -0400, Tristan McLeay wrote:
> > *I'm aware some (primarily American I believe) dialects skip the 'and' in
> > all cases at least nowadays.
>
> It depends on context.  The man on the American street generally says the "and"
> after "hundred", but in matters of technical or legal precision,
> "and" is reserved for the decimal point (this is the case, for instance,
> in the written-out currency amounts on checks).
Indeed, using the "and" is considered incorrect by prescriptivists.

> > Numbers in Quenya are written in the opposite direction. I've always
> > considered our numbers to be backwards, going from small to large seems to
> > better agree with my sense of aesthetics or something.
>
> It makes more sense mathematically, too, and in Arabic the numbers do
> proceed from small to large
It may work well with small numbers, but with large numbers, the
big-to-small order gives you an immediate idea of the magnitude, by
starting out with, say, "five million ..."

Personally, I prefer large-to-small in everything.  I like the Japanese
style of year-month-day, for example, as well as family name given name
and country city.  My personal sense of esthetics appears to be the
opposite of Tristan's.  :-)

--
"There's no such thing as 'cool'.  Everyone's just a big dork or nerd,
you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." -
overheard
ICQ: 18656696
AIM Screen-Name: NikTaylor42