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Cherokee Numerals

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

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Re: Cherokee Numerals

#11

Post by statstutor »

mod wrote: post #5

Wow, this is dense. > From the Egyptian hieratic numerals used in almost all the quotidian tasks of the Egyptian state, to the traditional Sinhalese numerals of south India and Sri Lanka, or the Siniform numerals developed for the Jurchin script in 12th-century China, ciphered-additive numeration is cross-culturally recurrent. In that sentence, the article hasn't defined hieratic or quotidian, and the whole sentence…

> In that sentence, the article hasn't defined hieratic or quotidian

I suspect the author is a native French speaker? Where "quotidien" is an every-day word.

Re: Cherokee Numerals

#12

Post by ceratin6 »

JdeBP wrote: post #3

It's also interesting how history has taken us to the point that an anthropologist names a numeral system invented in India and brought to Europe via Africa "Western", because readers will understand that name, and uses that name in contrast to a system that was invented in the actual West. Also, not enough is made of the fact that the numeral system was based upon United States decimal coinage. Viewed in terms of 1…

I rather thought this stupid:

> We don’t know what impetus exists for developing a ciphered-additive system where the signs for 20 through 90 have their own distinct signs, and where there is a multiplier for 10 in place of a zero

Romantic languages have an obvious difference when reading the words representing them when in comes to numbers under ten, 11-15, and multiples of ten to 90. English’s 11-12 differs from other teens. 20-90 may perhaps be hybrids of words and numerals to eliminate confusion or seem more familiar to speakers.

It’s also obvious why a multiplier for 10 would replace zero, as that’s what it does.

Am I missing something here??

Re: Cherokee Numerals

#13

Post by blackshaw »

felipelemos wrote: post #8
JdeBP wrote: post #3

It's also interesting how history has taken us to the point that an anthropologist names a numeral system invented in India and brought to Europe via Africa "Western", because readers will understand that name, and uses that name in contrast to a system that was invented in the actual West. Also, not enough is made of the fact that the numeral system was based upon United States decimal coinage. Viewed in terms of 1…

Curiously I have never heard of it as Western numerals, but only as Arabic, and that's how I learned at school.

To make matters more confusing, modern Arabs don't use the numerals we call "Arabic": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals

Re: Cherokee Numerals

#14

Post by JumpCrisscross »

statstutor wrote: post #11
mod wrote: post #5

Wow, this is dense. > From the Egyptian hieratic numerals used in almost all the quotidian tasks of the Egyptian state, to the traditional Sinhalese numerals of south India and Sri Lanka, or the Siniform numerals developed for the Jurchin script in 12th-century China, ciphered-additive numeration is cross-culturally recurrent. In that sentence, the article hasn't defined hieratic or quotidian, and the whole sentence…

> In that sentence, the article hasn't defined hieratic or quotidian I suspect the author is a native French speaker? Where "quotidien" is an every-day word.

It’s also a non-archaic English word.

Re: Cherokee Numerals

#15

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

blackshaw wrote: post #13
felipelemos wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curiously I have never heard of it as Western numerals, but only as Arabic, and that's how I learned at school.

To make matters more confusing, modern Arabs don't use the numerals we call "Arabic": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals

There are however Arab regions where it is more common to see so-called "Western/Arabic" numerals used instead of the native-Arabic-script numerals. This is the case of Morocco, for instance.

Re: Cherokee Numerals

#16

Post by statstutor »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #14
statstutor wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In that sentence, the article hasn't defined hieratic or quotidian I suspect the author is a native French speaker? Where "quotidien" is an every-day word.

It’s also a non-archaic English word.

My point is that there is a difference that creates a category of error in bilingual speakers.

French speakers are likely to use the word fairly commonly; whereas, people with English as their first language are unlikely to know it.

So, via translation, the readability level has changed considerably.

Re: Cherokee Numerals

#17

Post by Igelau »

mod wrote: post #5

Wow, this is dense. > From the Egyptian hieratic numerals used in almost all the quotidian tasks of the Egyptian state, to the traditional Sinhalese numerals of south India and Sri Lanka, or the Siniform numerals developed for the Jurchin script in 12th-century China, ciphered-additive numeration is cross-culturally recurrent. In that sentence, the article hasn't defined hieratic or quotidian, and the whole sentence…

The article was adapted from the book. I think we can expect a linguistic anthropologist's history of numerical notations to be above a Grade 9 reading level.

Re: Cherokee Numerals

#18

Post by todd8 »

mod wrote: post #5

Wow, this is dense. > From the Egyptian hieratic numerals used in almost all the quotidian tasks of the Egyptian state, to the traditional Sinhalese numerals of south India and Sri Lanka, or the Siniform numerals developed for the Jurchin script in 12th-century China, ciphered-additive numeration is cross-culturally recurrent. In that sentence, the article hasn't defined hieratic or quotidian, and the whole sentence…

These words appear rather frequently in academic writing on anthropology and linguistics. If you were in grad school studying in these fields it is likely that you would be using most of these words in your own writing. Computer scientists have their own arcane vocabulary, e.g. cryptography, Turing machine, monoid

Consider quotidian (meaning daily), this is an old word that has become more popular in past forty years and has now made its way out of academic writing into ordinary English and appeared about 35 times in HN comments in the past year. It is roughly as common in ordinary English as the word cryptography, but "cryptography" appeared about 49 times in HN comments in the past month.

Google ngram viewer gives a nice comparison of word frequencies in Google's corpus of scanned books. See [1] for a frequency comparison of the some of the words mentioned and the CS words cryptography, Turing machine, Unicode. (Sorry about the link size!)

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cryptography%2...

Re: Cherokee Numerals

#19

Post by todd8 »

jomar wrote: post #6
mod wrote: post #5

Wow, this is dense. > From the Egyptian hieratic numerals used in almost all the quotidian tasks of the Egyptian state, to the traditional Sinhalese numerals of south India and Sri Lanka, or the Siniform numerals developed for the Jurchin script in 12th-century China, ciphered-additive numeration is cross-culturally recurrent. In that sentence, the article hasn't defined hieratic or quotidian, and the whole sentence…

There's a very simple trick: for an overview reading, it doesn't matter what those words mean . Just skip over them: From the Egyptian some-class-of numerals used in almost all the some-kind-of tasks of the Egyptian state, etc. (Also, welcome to reading a text for which you are perhaps not the target audience. Now think about all the computing jargon that we tend to just take for granted in our own writing...)

I had a roommate in college that always looked up every word he didn't know in the dictionary. I adopted this method of improving my vocabulary and recommend it to people that wish to have a broader vocabulary.

It is especially easy to use the MacOS dictionary feature by simply right clicking on any word to bring up a context menu to lookup the word.

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