91–100 of 121 posts
Nice to see that Mandarin and Japanese have simple number systems compared to English. It might be worthwhile to learn them and impress your friends while you're reading numbers from restaurant menu-cards :)
Apparently the person who compiled this has never tried to actually count items in Japanese, to figure out which of the two number systems to use and which counter words to use.
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I am not a native Hindi speaker by any means, and I certainly haven't done math in it. But my experience (in places like Delhi) is that people routinely use Hindi up to 20, then give up and switch to English.
This is only true for young urban middle class people.
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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.
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Initially, Russian used the same convention for 40 as it does for other multiples of 10. Other Slavic languages still do. However, 4 (четыре) is the longest word by syllable count in the 1..10 range, so over time a shorter word that used to mean "a bag with 40 skins" (apparently a standard count to make some article of garment) came to replace it. The original meaning is all but forgotten now, and сорок means only 40…
Thanks for sharing. Studying Russian has helped me notice interesting patterns in languages. Where there is much friction (due to heavy usage, difficult pronunciation, or both) languages tend to break rules to make things easier to say. For example, it's trivial to conjugate a verb like "контролировать" that you might only use occasionally, but verbs that you say dozens or hundreds of times a day, like "идти" become…
Irregular verbs generally tend to be the ones that are used most often, and that are most archaic.
Looking at languages there are lost of interesting patterns you can notice. It's even more fun if you look at ones from an entirely different family. Some agglutinating languages may have no irregular verbs at all.
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In french it's base ten only. AFAIK it's just the names, particularly in France, that are a bit confusing. I don't think francophones think of quatre-vingts as 20 20 20 20, but as 80. Just like english is not base-12 because its eleven and twelve, and not oneteen and twoteen.
Just the names doesn't account for 80 + 10, 80 + 11, ..., 80 + 19.
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Just the names doesn't account for 80 + 10, 80 + 11, ..., 80 + 19.
Isn't it like quatre-vingts and ten, eleven, etc?
How do they quantify complexity?
A LOT of these have massive errors. I strongly recommend comparing all that to this paper: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5ca1/fa0ffca55e9003053de2f5... - Harald Hammarström - Rarities in Numeral Systems (2009) And this page: https://mpi-lingweb.shh.mpg.de/numeral/ "Numeral Systems of the World's Languages" By the way: If anyone can find a digital copy of this paper from 1840 by Augustin-Louis Cauchy (yes, THAT Cau…
>But he doesn't elaborate on it further, and neither does anyone else from what I can tell, and I have yet to figure out the trick 5 * 9 = 5 * (10 - 1) = 50 - 5 = 45 Specifically, you need to know everything in the 5x5 area, and how to multiply by 10. More generally, any digit 6-9 can be rewritten as (10 - (10 - digit)) and then you can apply distribution rules to clean things up. Here's a three by two digit example:…
Crazy interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8yEH8TZUsk