On Friday, October 24, 2014 23:36:18 Zilong Lee wrote:
> I'm a native Mandarin speaker. In East Asia, we have different number
> scales than the West, especially when the number gets bigger than 10
> thousand, we use another word, namely '萬/万(wan4)' in Chinese, '만/萬(man)' in
> Korean and '万'(man) in Japanese(I'm not sure whether it exists in other
> East Asian languages like Vietnamese and Mongolian, etc.), instead of
> keeping using thousand. So to a Chinese/Korean/Japanese ear, '17 thousand'
> sounds very confusing.
>
> If Lojban is truly culturally neutral, I think we should have an equivalent
> word of 10-thousand. Is it already there? or that it has never been thought
> about?
I don't know if any Lojbanist has thought about it, but East Asia is not the
only place where this system has been used. Ancient Greek used the myriadic
system. Aramaic (and probably also Hebrew, the words are cognate) also used
the myriadic system; the number in Revelation 9:16 is δυο μυριαδες μυριαδων
(with lots of variations, some dropping "two") in Greek and תרתין רבו רבון
(tarteyn rebu rebwan) in Aramaic, both meaning "two myriad myriads". Modern
Greek, though, uses εκατομμυριο (hundred myriad) for million and bases the
words for bigger numbers on that.
Among the six source languages, there's another that uses a different system.
Hindi and other Indic languages have words for ten times the powers of a
hundred: hazar, lakh, crore, abaj, sankh. A big number is written as
4,29,49,67,296.
Pierre
--
La sal en el mar es más que en la sangre.
Le sel dans la mer est plus que dans le sang.
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