Lovely! I remember how stunned I was when I first realised that enumeration was a linguistic technology, and was furthermore a technology which had to be invented at a particular time and which not all communities share. Previously, I had assumed that counting was coeval with human language itself, and it was an enormous shift of perspective to realise that this is not the case.
It may be worthwhile to point out that a fully functional technology of enumeration also requires recursion: ie. the ability to count to arbitrarily high numbers by nesting signifiers in a way which implicitly involves concepts of addition and multiplication. The lack of the facility gives you languages in which one can count explicitly up to some low number but no higher, while the ability to recurse lets you count to twenty-three and six hundred eighty nine and four hundred fifty two thousand seven hundred twelve.
So… I am curious how this works in some languages even today.
In English, the naming convention for very large or very small numbers quickly becomes formulaic and based on root prefixes for small numbers. It eventually starts to become unwieldy anyway, but in practices for really big numbers we usually only need a few named reference points defined by functions of some kind that are compactly expressable.
But in Chinese, at least up to 10^28-1, you need a new word and new character every 4 orders of magnitude, and IDK what happens after that. Anyone know the Mandarin for centillion? How about an octigintillion centillions (octigintcentillion?)?
Lovely! I remember how stunned I was when I first realised that enumeration was a linguistic technology, and was furthermore a technology which had to be invented at a particular time and which not all communities share. Previously, I had assumed that counting was coeval with human language itself, and it was an enormous shift of perspective to realise that this is not the case.
It may be worthwhile to point out that a fully functional technology of enumeration also requires recursion: ie. the ability to count to arbitrarily high numbers by nesting signifiers in a way which implicitly involves concepts of addition and multiplication. The lack of the facility gives you languages in which one can count explicitly up to some low number but no higher, while the ability to recurse lets you count to twenty-three and six hundred eighty nine and four hundred fifty two thousand seven hundred twelve.
So… I am curious how this works in some languages even today.
In English, the naming convention for very large or very small numbers quickly becomes formulaic and based on root prefixes for small numbers. It eventually starts to become unwieldy anyway, but in practices for really big numbers we usually only need a few named reference points defined by functions of some kind that are compactly expressable.
But in Chinese, at least up to 10^28-1, you need a new word and new character every 4 orders of magnitude, and IDK what happens after that. Anyone know the Mandarin for centillion? How about an octigintillion centillions (octigintcentillion?)?