Wouldn't unary be considered the least complex?
Which language/society/culture uses unary?
Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)
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Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)
#12I think they're understanding the complexity of the Japanese number system by quite a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word
Classifiers are mostly orthogonal to the number system, and they're really no different from e.g. English using "a herd of cattle" or "a murder of crows" to redundantly encode the kind of thing being talked about. I'm actually not aware of any language that doesn't have different units of measurement for different objects, it's just that some languages effectively make it mandatory to use them. (E.g. in Chinese you could just always say 一个 to mean "one" but it sounds strange when there's a specific form that's more common.)
Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)
#13I don't understand how the author is judging complexity. The top one, Huli, is a base-15 number system but looks quite regular otherwise. French, on the other hand, switches from a base-10 to a base-20 at 80 and then switches things up at 97. According to the listing, Welsh sits somewhere between these two but it has separate numbering systems for {20s, 40s, 60s, 80s}, {30s, 70s, 90s}, and {50s}. That seems much more…
Huli appears regular, but a construction like "ngui ki, ngui tebone-gonaga tebira" to mean "fifteen twos and the three of the third fifteen" does seem like quite a mouthful for 33.
Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)
#14I don't understand how the author is judging complexity. The top one, Huli, is a base-15 number system but looks quite regular otherwise. French, on the other hand, switches from a base-10 to a base-20 at 80 and then switches things up at 97. According to the listing, Welsh sits somewhere between these two but it has separate numbering systems for {20s, 40s, 60s, 80s}, {30s, 70s, 90s}, and {50s}. That seems much more…
Also, Swiss French, which has proper words for seventy and ninety, is considered more complex than French French, even though I'd consider having specific words simpler (especially given the complexity of 97 (which is said as 4 x 20 + 10 + 7)
Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)
#15I don't understand how the author is judging complexity. The top one, Huli, is a base-15 number system but looks quite regular otherwise. French, on the other hand, switches from a base-10 to a base-20 at 80 and then switches things up at 97. According to the listing, Welsh sits somewhere between these two but it has separate numbering systems for {20s, 40s, 60s, 80s}, {30s, 70s, 90s}, and {50s}. That seems much more…
Huli appears regular, but a construction like "ngui ki, ngui tebone-gonaga tebira" to mean "fifteen twos and the three of the third fifteen" does seem like quite a mouthful for 33.
It's not "fifteen twos" but "two fifteens".
They're just counting how many fifteens they've got: "two complete fifteens, and 3 from the third fifteen"
Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)
#16Can any native Hindi speakers comment on the difficulty of doing math in a language where every number 1-100 has its own name?
Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)
#17Doesn't hindi have its own script for numbers as well?
The 'Number' column doesn't reflect the same fact very well.
Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)
#18I don't understand how the author is judging complexity. The top one, Huli, is a base-15 number system but looks quite regular otherwise. French, on the other hand, switches from a base-10 to a base-20 at 80 and then switches things up at 97. According to the listing, Welsh sits somewhere between these two but it has separate numbering systems for {20s, 40s, 60s, 80s}, {30s, 70s, 90s}, and {50s}. That seems much more…
Huli appears regular, but a construction like "ngui ki, ngui tebone-gonaga tebira" to mean "fifteen twos and the three of the third fifteen" does seem like quite a mouthful for 33.
Is the complexity based on pronunciation here?
Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)
#19Another article that was published a while ago had an interesting take on it. There is a quite high correlation between numbering system of a language and how quickly/well kids speaking that language learn counting and math skills.
Apparently, the article itself is taken down, but I found an archived version. https://web.archive.org/web/20141215072819/http://playthink....
Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)
#20I don't understand how the author is judging complexity. The top one, Huli, is a base-15 number system but looks quite regular otherwise. French, on the other hand, switches from a base-10 to a base-20 at 80 and then switches things up at 97. According to the listing, Welsh sits somewhere between these two but it has separate numbering systems for {20s, 40s, 60s, 80s}, {30s, 70s, 90s}, and {50s}. That seems much more…
Huli seems to change (though using a common root?) the words for the small numbers (like 1, 2, 3) when they get applied to how many 15s have been counted. "one fifteen" is "nguira ni", where does "ni" come from? "two fifteen" is "ngui ki", "ki" from "kira", why'd "nguira" abbreviated?
It's regular in construction, but the words change and drop parts of the basic number without a particular pattern (as an outsider to the language). "kira" -> "ki" makes sense. "duria" -> "dauni" -> "dau" kind of makes sense, but adds an extra letter (how does the sound actually change?). "tebira" -> "tebone" -> "tebo". A pattern is forming. Drop the "r-" and replace it with an "n-" (except for some) and later drop the "n-".