Re: [lojban] Does Lojban have an equivalent of 萬/만/万 (10 thousand)?

[Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org>]

On Sunday, October 26, 2014 13:44:54 Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
> 2014-10-26 2:05 GMT+03:00 Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org>:
> > 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.
> 
> So what roots do we have?
> 10^2:
> Hindi hazar
> 10^4:
> man/van/wan for East Asia,
> r?b for Aramaic
> miriad for Ancient Greek
> Hindi lax
> 10^6:
> Hindi tcrore
> 10^8:
> Hindi abadj
> 10^10:
> Hindi sanx
> 
> ?
> ju'o i determined hindi numbers incorrectly.

The Hindi numbers are all off by a factor of 10 (hazar=10^3, lax=10^5, kyrod or 
whatever=10^7, abadj=10^9, sanx=10^11). "Crore" is the English spelling. In 
Hindi, the first r is a normal tap r, but the second is some sort of rhotic 
which developed from a retroflex stop. In Gujarati it is still a stop. Hindi 
also has an aspirated version of this rhotic in "Garhwal".

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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