Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)

sf.airnet.ne.jp

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 121 posts

Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)

#31

Post by ghoul2 »

dsr_ wrote: post #16

Can any native Hindi speakers comment on the difficulty of doing math in a language where every number 1-100 has its own name?

Thats incorrect (in the article). The words are compound words, and they really should not be counted like they are here.

example:

chauntees = 34 = 30 and 4. Word for 30 is tees and word for 4 is char - combined to form chaun-tees.

chhuttees = 36 = 30 and 6. Word for 30 is tees and word for 6 is chey - combined to form chhut-tees.

So on for all the words from 20 till 99. The combination rules might not be obvious here in transcription, but they come naturally to a Hindi speaker. So in reality there are dedicated words for 1 thru 19, and then the rest are compounds formed from the words corresponding to each digit.

Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)

#32

Post by hvidgaard »

julian_t wrote: post #21

I'd put traditional Danish numbering a bit further up the list... it's pretty strange ( http://www.olestig.dk/dansk/numbers.html )

I was surprised to see Danish so high on the list, but after a short while it's not too surprising. It's base-20 for the first 20, like English. Then it's backwards base-10 up to 99 with special names for the whole 10s, 42 is pronounced as "2 and 40". Above 99 it's base-10, 420 is "400 20". But if it's 428 it's "400 8 and 20", but 512 would be "500 12". It's not difficult, it's just a special rule for 1-20, backwards for 21-99, and then straight as you'd expect (including the irregular first 20). Okay, it is quite confusing for none native speakers. To our defense, we use a system more like the Norwegian and Swedish for formal documents including contracts and cheques, though the latter has been phased out in Denmark.

The "perfect" would obviously be a purely base-10 with suffix if it's 10's, 100's, ect.

Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)

#34

Post by dingo_bat »

jazzyb wrote: post #6

I 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…

Agreed. Hindi is ranked 4th most difficult but the system is identical to English (rank 41). Just the symbols for the digits are different. Even they are similar looking!

Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)

#36

Post by FabHK »

mratzloff wrote: post #30
yorwba wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

No way. It is absolutely different in practice because of Japanese counter words. A counter word is a counting prefix (different from the abstract number word) plus different suffixes for a variety of things. This object is long and thin, so it has one suffix. This object is a drop of liquid, so it has another suffix. This is a small animal, so it gets another suffix. The counting words for use with these suffixes ar…

That's what GP yorwba said.

Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)

#37

Post by nileshtrivedi »

dingo_bat wrote: post #34
jazzyb wrote: post #6

I 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…

Agreed. Hindi is ranked 4th most difficult but the system is identical to English (rank 41). Just the symbols for the digits are different. Even they are similar looking!

Not at all. As an example, consider how 55 and 57 are pronounced. "PachPAN"and "SattaVAN". The components have changed arbitrarily for no reason. 70 is "Sattar" but 71 becomes "IkHattar". 2 is "Do", but 12,22,32 use "Ba" as the prefix. Plenty more cases like this.

Compare this to "Fifty five" and "Fifty seven".

Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)

#38

Post by abhishekjha »

dingo_bat wrote: post #34
jazzyb wrote: post #6

I 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…

Agreed. Hindi is ranked 4th most difficult but the system is identical to English (rank 41). Just the symbols for the digits are different. Even they are similar looking!

I noticed that Hindi hasn't been represented by its own script in the 'Number' column which it should.

http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/language/number/hindi.html

Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)

#39

Post by rlpb »

abhishek0318 wrote: post #27
dsr_ wrote: post #16

Can any native Hindi speakers comment on the difficulty of doing math in a language where every number 1-100 has its own name?

Every number doesn't have its own name. If you observe closely there is a pattern. From 21 to 99, you can observe that every digit at tens place decides the suffix and the digit at ones place decides the prefix.

Further, the author says "because of a lot of irregular pronunciation, you have to memorize 100 different words as if it were a centesimal system". But I could say the same for English. We won't say "three-ty-three", we say "thirty-three". Hindi's irregularities are pretty much at the same level.

Re: Number systems of the world, sorted by complexity of counting (2006)

#40

Post by Moru »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #23
hmd_imputer wrote: post #19

Another 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....

It seems that a child will perhaps learn to count quicker in Japanese than in French, say, but the complexity and inclusion of factors/compounds also seem like they would push a more complex understanding of number to be adopted. I wonder if a French people make change with 20 Euro-cent coins more often than others do.

I bet they use card instead... In Germany you stand in line waiting for everyone to find exactly the right change, be them young or old. Most people pay with cash even though it seems to get more common to use card. Euro has at least eight different coins. Sweden has 1, 2, 5, 10 as coins but most people still pay with card because it's easier and people are not burned by the big brother syndrome of the WW1/2 :-)

Would be interesting to see relative difficulty of each language, some of them are pretty close and have very similar difficulty while others are close but widely different difficulty.

Post reply on HN