Talk:Numeral (linguistics)

Billion

(inserted for readability Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 13:36, 4 March 2010 (UTC))

Are there any countries besides the US and Canada which use the American definition of "billion"? How about Australia? What about french-Canada? Philippines?

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The UK has now adopted the North American billion. I don't know whether the process was formalised, but a billion is nearly always 10⁹ here.

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Wow, this is big news, then all the pages about number names are wrong. Are there any references?

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Well if you take "The (London) Times" coverage of the last government budget, all the references to billions there are 10⁹ : http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,584-95524,00.html

Similarly, if you read the last official budget statement its clear that they either a) use the US billion or b) This is the richest country ever... (60 million people, 2.5 billion spending increase would be 40,000 GBP per capita, or about twice the average income :)) http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/budget2001/fsbr/chap1.html

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In Australia, these days everyone uses the American billion. -- Simon J Kissane

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It makes sense to use the American system because it has finer granularity to be useful in the financial and statistical settings. The British system is probably good to use in astronomy only.

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Sounds to me like the number pages need to be changed appropriately--retaining information about the old British system, of course... --LMS

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Done. --AxelBoldt

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Does anyone know when Britain and Australia switched to the American system? I'm too young to remember it happening here in Australia, but I know it happened at some stage... -- Simon J Kissane

I don't think there was an explicit switchover, it just happened, probably by exposure to US media. They were still teaching European billions back in the late 1980s whilst I was at primary school. --Robert Merkel

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In South Africa you use the American system when you speak English and the European system when you speak Afrikaans - maybe that's why our currency has gone down the drain recently ... clasqm

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The article still says "the American system" vs. "the European system"... I'm not sure exactly how this needs to be changed, but it does look like it needs to be changed. --LMS

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Why is it claimed that the Japanese system does away with the redundancy of number names? They seem to need more words than the European system, and slightly less than the American system. --AxelBoldt

They have no "teen" words, and no "twenty", "thirty", ... "ninety" words.

That passage remains vague; reading the article, I couldn't figure out what it was trying to get at. I'm also not sure it's really true. Japanese and Korean, for example, have several parallel systems of numbers, one of native origin and one derived from Chinese. They are used in different ways and for different things. At least in Korean, there actually are native Korean equivalents to "twenty," "thirty," etc., and I wouldn't be surprised if they exist in Japanese too. --Reuben 00:04, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

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zero

In English the word no can function like a number.

One can ask "How many apples are there in the fruit bowl" and get the answer "There are no apples in the fruit bowl".

As such no is a synomym of zero.

Zero can only be used a predicate in a sentence, but no can not be used that way.

• The number of apples is zero.
• There are no apples.

what does "zed" mean?

The table at the beginning lists numbers from one to ten. I think that it should also indicate which of those systems do, and do not, have a number for zero! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.210.58.100 (talk) 14:05, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

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Removed this from the article, because it's completely confusing, and explained further down more clearly:

In the European system a billion is a million million, a trillion is a million billion, and so forth; a thousand billion is called a billiard, a thousand trillion a trilliard etc. In the American system a billion is a thousand million, a trillion is a thousand billion, and so forth. See more below.

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There should be at least a link to some of the Mathematics of really large numbers. For example, the infamous arrow notation, such as 3^^^^3 which describes a really large number, but I forget the details.

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This article needs to be refactored -- it is too long, and covers several topics. However, there's lots of good material in it!

Numerology

I have removed a section about Numerology "science". I think it doesn't belong here (if anywhere at all). Or am I mistaken? 62.179.86.217 00:06, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

No. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 13:36, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

split

Someone proposed a split, so I'm starting the discussion. I definitely think 'numeral' as a part of speech needs its own article. The stuff on written numerals can probably be merged into other articles. Discussion of very large numerals is likewise a distinct subject. kwami (talk) 07:28, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Pro split: Yes. Numerals are treated as a specific topic in grammars. This is a different topic than peoples' choice of number base, and how they do when counting on fingers (and toes). Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 13:46, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Decimal - round numbers

The decimal section, claiming why decimal was/is so common says (among other reasons):

a human comfort level with rounded figures and the ease it can express and calculate very large numbers

This makes no sense. ANY base will yield round numbers 10000 is 'round' in any base --it just means different values in different bases. And the ability to calculate very large numbers is a function of positional notation, not the paricular base chosen for it. I've removed those two points. 164.144.252.26 (talk) 17:35, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Additional Chinese numerals

There is a slight problem in the table of Chinese numerals in the "Additional numerals" section. The article confuses "Traditional" and "Formal" numerals, both of which are labeled "complex" here. For a clearer explanation, see [1]. You will see that some of the characters on the "complex" row are traditional characters, while others are simplified but formal ones. laug (talk) 13:50, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

I've changed the names to 'everyday', 'formal' and 'Suzhou'. 'Formal' for the ones used on bank notes etc., 'everyday' for the ones commonly used and 'Suzhou' as it's what Wikipedia uses for Suzhou numerals. It's still far from perfect: it's missing the alternate forms for 〡,〢and 〣 and names such as 两 and 幺. These could be added below, though much of this can be found on articles linked from here, which is perhaps better as it can be explained properly there.

It's not clear why there are two tables either, as they have a lot of overlap, with the second one mostly containing the first one (and where it doesn't it could be added). I would merge them except it uses fonts I've not got. JohnBlackburne (talk) 12:06, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Are the "Formal" numerals really numbers, or are they the Chinese equivalent of the name of the number rather than the number itself, e.g. one as opposed to 1 ? 84.9.125.170 (talk) 18:57, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Formal numbers are used on bank notes, on cheques and other important/legal documents to prevent forgery. The 'everyday' numbers include some like 一，二 that could easily be modified into other numbers. They represent the same thing otherwise. See Chinese numerals for more information. JohnBlackburne (talk) 19:42, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Base 4

Could be nice to correlate the "4: quaternary" section of this article with the Quaternary_numeral_system#Occurrence_in_human_languages article. AnonMoos (talk) 09:43, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Grammar

What about the grammatical class of numbers? They're treated as a special class of words in the Indo-European grammar system, but they're either regarded as adjectives with special derivations, f.ex. Latin unus/una/unum, or as unflexing (?) particles (?), f.ex. quattuor. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 13:40, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Yes, please someone answer this question! A detailed explanation of how numbers are act and how they are regarded within language would be very useful. BigSteve (talk) 16:28, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Removed section "Mathematical types"

I removed the section "Mathematical types", because whoever wrote it doesn't understand the difference between classifications of mathematical objects, and differing schemes for the written representation of those objects. Binary, decimal, etc., are not different types of numbers, they are simply different schemes for representing a number symbolically. Imaginary, fractional, algebraic, etc., are actually distinct classifications of objects, as opposed to just different representations. And it was an uncited WP:SYNTHESIS anyway. --SJK (talk) 09:11, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

English and German are duodecimal?

Really? What's the reasoning behind this? cntrational (talk) 14:10, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

It says "Duodecimal numbers ... are a frequent occurrence" then lists some places they can be found. In English there's the names for numbers (special from 1 to 12), 'dozen', units in time, currency, length. Some are obsolete but they are still part of the language.

That's not duodecimal. No-one ever says 'two dozen three' for 27 or 'one gross and two' for 146. Deleted. — kwami (talk) 09:27, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Banish number system?

In the "Basis of counting system" section, under "5: quinary", reference is made to "the banish system", with banish hyperlinked to the page for banishment, as in exile. I have no idea what "banish" is and the reference is to a book, what's up? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.176.213.126 (talk) 19:10, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

I could not work out what it's referring to. Banish has always been a link to Banishment or Exile, and I could not find anything like a language or culture with that name with a wider search. I did find another quinary system while searching so I've replaced it with that.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 21:33, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

The word was introduced in this revision. From the edit comment in the following revision, it appears that the editor in question is dyslexic. Perhaps he actually meant Danish (although Danish doesn't have any quinary aspects as far as I can determine). You'd have to check the source, though. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 15:40, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

"Not all peoples count" - too vague, and open to misinterpretation

I have replaced the sentence "Not all peoples count" with "Not all langauges have numeral systems", which is both more precise and more accurate. "Count" is too vague a term here; to say that "not all peoples count" could be read as meaning that not all peoples have a number sense, or that number sense is limited by vocabulary. This is an outdated form of linguistic determinism which has been entirely discredited by studies such as the one on Aboriginal children reported in "Aboriginal kids can count without numbers" (which, ironically, is cited as a source further down in our article). This article is about the vocabulary for naming numbers in various natural languages, which has little or no correlation with the number sense and arithmetic ability of individuals who speak those langauges. Gandalf61 (talk) 07:59, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

And the statement about Anindilyakwa (with the old spelling Enindhilyagwa) is wrong, the language has terms for numbers up to 20, but kids have mostly switched to English numbers. I'll take it out. Dougg (talk) 06:53, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

They aren't quite the same thing. Your language may have numerals, and yet people don't count with it. — kwami (talk) 07:58, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

What is a numeral?

I learned that 'numeral' is a part of speech, and that's what most of my sources say. That is, if it's a noun or adjective, it's not a numeral. We give a list of all sorts of words from other parts of speech in our 'Types of numerals' section, ref'ing SIL. Do you think maybe SIL dumbed it down a bit, because for their purposes it doesn't really matter, like calling any attributive an 'adjective'?

Do we have a rigorous definition of 'numeral'? It would have to be language-specific, of course, but we could give examples. — kwami (talk) 08:01, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

[discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics#what is a 'numeral'?.]

Pavey (Structure of Language) terms the diff tween 'one' and 'seventy-seven' a word vs a phrase. I would normally go with 'compound' for the latter: should we change to Pavey's terminology? — kwami (talk) 20:17, 5 March 2012 (UTC)