58 and other Confusing Numbers - Numberphile
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When I trade with my homies in Minecraft, we refer to 64 diamonds as a stack, so I guess we are counting in base 64?
Possibly, but that's also 1000000 in binary.
With large trades you also get things like shulker boxes being used as units
Possiblly ya
The interesting thing with minecraft is that it base ten under under 64, base 64 (a stack) for small numbers over 64 and base 1728 (a shulker) or 3456 (a double chest) for larger numbers and maybe even base 3456x1728 for huge numbers. So we have this idea of this Frankenstein number with multiple bases. For example you could in theory use the number 3,34,14,26 to mean 34 and, 3 double chests, of skulkers, 14 stacks and 26 to designate the quantity 339610. What I wonder is, can that a legitimate number? If you have to include the commas for the number to be readable in any practical manner, if the number does not follow the while base^n rule, is it really a number or is it instead a series of numbers?
Thing is that's only for those products, there's also those which stack to 16 and unstackables so it's kinda unstable, but yeah Minecraft economy is kinda base 64
The Danish language is actually our best defense against invasions.
+hedgehog3180 And the weapon by which we will Confuse and Conquer.
Så er det ikke særligt effektivt
And The Best Part: If You Speak Any Scandinavian Language You Can Speak Danish, So Long As You Have A Potato!
rate eightx: ... and don’t swallow it.
I like your picture
imagine someone in papua new guinea watching star trek and wondering what a totally weird numbering and language system the klingons have
that's what I was thinking as well haha
+Red Rumble cool
Cooking With Cows I don't think they've discovered movies yet down there.
Keep calm and Kling On... brilliant!!
They were colonised by the Germans, British and Dutch over 100 years ago, so I'm pretty sure they have heard of movies by now
I am 17 and I still remember in third or fourth grade I had to learn both the system of naming and writings of numbers called the "Indian system" and "International system" ...on one side you guys have "who wants to be a millionaire" and we have " Kaun Banega crorepati".
Edit: just to add, CZcams also displays views/likes in lakhs and crore here..
I'm 13 and I can't even count to 100 in hindi... i mean it's SO HARD
@@drushyamalpani3587 padhai me dhyaan dega to sayad seekh jaye pr nhi in chutiyon ko CZcams pe aake comment krna h . Aur 13 k age m phone kisne diya tujhe!?
in ur edit my lppy is from USA so it displays millions but my phone which is also from america displays crores
and btw i know number beyond trillion upto mostly numbers
Wait so in India it's Crorepati? But in Sri Lanka it's Lakshapathi.... So.... As I could remember we get 20 lakh in LKR for final question. What's the value in the Indian Show? So if you get something crore in INR, and we get something lakh in LKR (which is about or below 0.50 INR), we get a way lesser prize for the last question?
@@yasithsilva2885 currently 7 crores for the final question.
Tom Scott really adds to Numberphile! He really opens my mind to a complete new branch of math. I'd love to see more of his.
RokeyGames well let's pressure him to do another one! :)
Numberphile
I loved the energy he brought, you could tell he was actually way into what he was teaching and getting excited about it. Love learning from people like that :)
Numberphile Using excruciating violence? lol
He has his own channel just called Tom Scott
Numberphile Mooaarr braadddyyy pleaaasseee
A correction and expanding on the Danish counting:
The system of using _half_ in fractional numbers was originally quite prevalent (and can still occasionally be found), but in Modern Danish is generally restricted to 1.5, which _halvanden_ (‘half-second’). The logic behind this isn’t, as Tom says here, that you subtract a half, as much as it is that in order to have ‘half of the second’, _you need to already have all of the first_.
If you go for a run, for example, and you get tired along the way and walk the rest of the way, you might say that you ran half of the third mile, but then you slowed down and walked home. This implies that you ran the first two miles, _plus_ half of the third one. In Ye Olden Times, a Dane might well say, then, that he ran _half-third_ mile: all of the first two, and then half of the third one.
This is exactly how counting in Danish works, except instead of miles, it’s twenties; or rather, it’s _times twenty_’s. The word for fifty, _halvtreds_, is a bastardised and cut-down shorter form of what was originally _halv-tredje sinds tyve_, or ‘half-third times twenty’ (_sinds_ is an old word meaning, essentially, ‘×’, i.e., multiplication; and _tyve_ is ‘twenty’). The same is true of seventy, which is _halvfjerds_ (originally _halv-fjerde sinds tyve_), ‘half-fourth times twenty’; and ninety, which is _halvfems_ (originally _halv-femte sinds tyve_), ‘half-fifth times twenty’.
Those all involve fractional multipliers of twenty (2.5, 3.5, and 4.5), so they use this ‘half-Xth’ method. Sixty and eighty, on the other hand, involve non-fractional multipliers of twenty (3 and 4), and they therefore have no need of the ‘half-Xth’ method-they are simply _tre sinds tyve_ ‘three times twenty’ and _fire sinds tyve_ ‘four times twenty’. (It has been joked that, to continue the trend, the Danish word for a hundred ought to be _fems_, but it’s not, because that would just be odd.)
Or at least, that’s what they all *were*, a long time ago. Some syllables have been chopped off since then-quite understandable, really, given that ‘78’, for instance, would have been _otte og halv-fjerde sinds tyve_ (‘eight and half-fourth times twenty’), which is quite long.
First, the final _‑e_ in all the ordinal numbers (_tredje_, _fjerde_, _femte_) got kicked out (in the case of _femte_, the t got booted along with it). Around this stage, people sort of stopped thinking about the maths behind it and just perceived it all as words for numbers, and they started treating them as single words, rather than phrases-writing them as single words, and pronouncing them with only one stressed syllable. That left us with _halvtredsindstyve_, _tresindstyve_, _halvfjerdsindstyve_, _firsindstyve_, and _halvfemsindstyve_.
Eventually, people realised that-since Danish puts the ‘ones’ (i.e., the numbers under ten) first and multiples of ten are always last-every single number that ends with a number in the 50-99 range was pretty annoyingly long and also ended in _‑sindstyve_. Kind of pointless to have half your numbers end in the same three syllables-that’s just useless crud. So those three syllables gradually got shaved off at the end, too. The only thing that was eventually left behind is the initial s in _sinds_: we now have _halvtreds_, _tres_, _halvfjerds_, _firs_, and _halvfems_, which one might semi-seriously transpose as ‘halfthirdt’, ‘threet’, ‘halffourtht’, ‘fourt’, and ‘halffiftht’. This is of course much simpler and much quicker to say, and you also don’t have to worry about the maths behind it-just learn the words. Most Danes, indeed, are quite unaware of this complex history behind the numbers they use every day.
Ordinal numbers are still a bit of a problem, though. Danish is less consistent in how it creates ordinal numbers than English, which uses _‑th_ for all ordinal numbers above three:
- one to three have their own quirky ones and are irregular;
- four uses _‑de_ and a different root vowel; and the d in _‑de_ is not pronounced anymore
- zero, five, six, eleven, twelve, thirty, and million (plus milliard, billion, billiard, etc.) use _‑te_, though six is quite irregular, too: _seks_ → _sjette_
- hundred and thousand are the same as their cardinal numbers (_hundrede_ and _tusinde_), although the cardinal numbers frequently drop the final _‑e_ in the singular
- seven, eight, nine, ten, and thirteen to twenty use _‑(e)nde_
Back when all the 50-99 words ended in _‑tyve_ ‘twenty’, the ordinals naturally ended in _‑tyvende_, because that’s the ordinal for twenty. In more formal and traditional language (and even in normal, everyday language to some people), they still do. To me, for instance, the ordinal number to go with _halvfjerds_ is _halvfjerdsindstyvende_. That appears ridiculously irregular on the surface, though, and many Danes have come up with simplified ordinals, using the apparently impressionally most common and ‘regular’ ending _‑ende_: _halvtreds_ → _halvtredsende_, etc. I expect in time, these will win out, but to me, they just sound bizarrely wrong, like saying ‘oneth’, ‘twoth’, and ‘threeth’ in English instead of ‘first’, ‘second’, and ‘third’.
Congratulations, by the way, if you managed to read all this. You now know more about Danish numbers than you ever cared to. ;-)
kokoshneta Ooh thanks for explaining all of that! :D Also the half-second thing reminded me that that's how it works in Finnish too... at least for 1.5. I imagine it was probably so for higher ones too back in the day. And the old way of counting beyond ten here worked a bit like that too. 11 is yksitoista ("one-of-second" roughly) short for yksitoistakymmentä ("one-of-the-second-ten"). For 11-19 that system is still in use but it used to work for any number between 10 and 100 at least. Yksikolmatta ("one-of-third) = 21, kaksikolmatta ("two-of-third") = 22... and so on. It fell out of use though.
Tuuliska
Interesting! I had always just assumed that _puolitoista_ was a loan from Swedish (before they got rid of that construction themselves). Never knew there used to be an _yksikolmatta_ as well!
It might still be a loan? Tbh I don't know where the system came from.
_Puolitoista_ could possibly still be a loan, but _yksi[kaksi…]kolmatta_ and even _yksi[…]toista_ can’t, because that never existed in Scandinavian.
This is superb, explaining not only how the number system works, but how (and why) it came to be the way it is, and how it continues to change. Thank you!
7:20 useful when you go to the doctor: "Where does it hurt?" - "Near 25, sir!"
gentuxable
Where is that
I have a feeling I don't want to know where that is.
Doctor:please simplify
Patient:sir I slipped on the stairs and i essentially wrecked my shin
If 26 and 27 were our legs
25 will be somewhere around
That
@@exellie2660 the hips obviously
He‘s basically giving the first few minutes of an introduction lecture to ethnomathematics, which is a relatively young but fascinating, actual field of study.
The crazy linguistics stuff is those Australian aboriginal languages that don't use relative terms for directions, they only use cardinal directions, so no "it's on the left, no on my left" which makes sense when you're a nomadic people in a country that is mainly desert and is hundreds of kilometres walk between hunting grounds. It's pretty cool, because they carry that over into English.
I don't know how new it is. I learned about this 20+ years ago in high school.
@@Diesel257 Well, if it’s old or new surely is a matter of perspective. Basically, ethnomathematics is the study of „everything about counting or calculating out of anthropology, archeology and sociology“, which means that its precursors are just as old as those disciplines, but as an actual field of study in its own right and involving mathematical analysis (rather than „mathematical laymen‘s hypotheses“ by archeologists et al), it was only introduced in the 1970s, which makes it young in comparison to other branches of the disciplines involved, let alone those disciplines themselves.
may i recomend “alex’s adventures in numberland”, for the uninitiated
whAAAAAAAAA????
I'm an anthropologist, so I really REALLY appreciate this linguistic content on this channel. Just so you know, not only Papua New Guinea (which is really the holy grail when it comes to linguistic and cultural isolates) but also Amazonia has some interesting counting and number systems. They also use the body count system where you go around your body. There is a graduate student doing his thesis on this subject of counting systems in Amazonia at the London School of Economics!
has the thesis been published as a pdf?
As a linguist I also liked this episode!
I hope he won't end up messing up with the locals as Napoleon Chagnon and his followers did 30 years ago..just for the sake of coming back with a new theory about the "savages" ((
Marcia Ascher's book _Mathematics Elsewhere_ is a great introduction to this kind of stuff.
"…that's a trillion."
Not even that is universal, actually. "Trillion" can mean 10^12 or 10^18.
@Vsus Here Yes, in the German language its exactly as you said it is in Poland 😁
Everywhere except the US you mean
10^18 gang
@Vsus Here yup, in Lithuania it's the same thing also
Vsus Here Same in Sweden.
The 'og' in 'otteoghalvtreds' actually just means 'and' :)
Mr_FJ that is true. Taler du dansk?
He did mention it was a binder, and it is.
NitronNeutron almost. He put the o with otte and called the g a link
"8 and a half to 3 times 20" is a really messed up way of saying 58
@@THEPELADOMASTER im danish and i didnt even know that, that was what i was saying.
I would like to give some more information on the Tongan counting system. While it is true that for brevity people mostly just say each digit of the numbers individually so that 771216 is “fitu fitu taha ua taha ono”, that would be pretty confusing since you would have to remember how many numbers were said to know the size of the number. Tongan has words for 10, 100, 1000, and 10,000 (hongofulu, teau, aafe, mano) and there are variants such as 20 and 30 being uofulu and tolungofulu, but these words for multiples of ten are too formal and are usually not used. 771216 would likely be said as fitu fitu mano tahaafe ua taha ono. (if you want to be formal you would say fitu fitu mano mā tahaafe mā uangeau mā hongofulu mā ono)
The year 2019 is always said as uaafe taha hiva rather than ua noa taha hiva, for example.
Are you Tongan?
@@xant8344 He seems not have seen your question, but I bet he is, or at least of Tongan ancestry, two reasons I think so. One he knows Tongan, two he has the same name of the great late Lomu who was the best rugby player of all time, played for the All Blacks (New Zealand) but who had parents from Tonga!
And the year 2020 is not spoken of.
@@paulrussell1207 jonah lomu chur my kuzzy
@@paulrussell1207 do they have haka? if yes I kinda interest on a kind of haka of easter island the most far east of my fam language
I love how he is so enthusiastic about it, he really brings over the energy
Speaking of fiction: the elves in LotR and Tolkien's other fiction use base six and twelve. The word "Menegroth" (an important city/palace in the Silmarillion) is translated as "Thousand Caves", but probably means (12 times 12 times 12) "1728 Caves" (or, more likely, the word just means a generic very large number to get the point across that it's a big underground palace/city).
Well, Tolkien was a linguist.
I came here to say just that
base 12 was already used by humans, just look at your clock :)
Just goes to show that Tolkein was a Linguist first and foremost.
Yup, and that's why it's so rare in fiction. Because Tolkien was a linguist and most authors aren't (or aren't dedicated enough to do a whole new language for every universe they create).
7:03 he looks like that old meme
DRDynamyte you made it your profile pic? Dedication.
*_SUPER SLAV_*
"old"
xD
@@valinhorn42 OLD
1:58 the normal reaction to Danish for a linguist, obviously
At 1. "58" lol what are the odds!
Tom’s explanation is great, but I always thought it was easier to think that you are half a dozen away from sixty.
‘Halv’ meaning half and ‘treds’ meaning sixty.
It is the same with ‘halvfjerds’ that means seventy.
‘Halv’ meaning half and ‘fjerds/firs’ meaning eighty.
@@AxelUldbjerg Dozen is 12, which funnily enough is how many inches there is in a foot.
English uses scores insted of snes for some reason.
I found something really fun that makes Danish counting seem perfectly reasonable. Skokk is 60, or three score. Øll is four score, or 80. Tylft is another word for dozen, or 12. Storhundre is 10 tylft, or dozen, meaning 120. Gross is 12 dozen, or tylft, or 144. Storgross is a dozen gross which is a dozen dozen, or 1728.
Compared to that whole mess, and there's just absolute heaps more names for different numbers used in different settings, eight and three and a half score makes complete sense, or eight and three and a half twenties
@@WlatPziupp I guess, i need the rest of the explanation. Your comparison to danish makes not sense.
"og" means "and" in danish. So when we say 58, we actually say "eight and fifty" :)
Yeah same in Dutch: achtenvijftig, acht is 8, en is and, vijftig is 50
Eight and fifty lol
All Germanic languages. Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.
Stuart Morrow why
@@Daan03 Don't know, the only other mixed-endian thing off the top of my head has an explanation that I can't see applying here. (The thing: American mm/dd/yy dates, the explanation: Americans verbalise dates as e.g. "October 2nd" which made them want to write them down that way)
That's not the part Tom was complaining about xD
you lost me at "half thrice times 20"
A lot of us Danes would find it just as weird as you do. To us, “halvtreds” is just a word that means 50. We don’t contemplate its etymology every time we use it.
I'm not Danish, but I speak German (similar enough). So half thrice means a half befor three. Like in German we dont say half past six or slmething. We say half (to) six with the "to" bekng omitted for simplicity.
A more accurate translation would be "half third", as in "half of the third one". But in order to have half of the third one, you must already have the first one and the second one. So you have two wholes and one half. That's why "half third" means 2.5.
And obviously, 2.5 times 20 equals 50.
Same
@@hopseshopsidis Yea, I'm Norwegian and we do the same with time (hour of the day). We say "halv tre" for half past two. That's our shared germanic heritage. The Swedes don't though, they get as confused by "halv tre" as I get by "halvtreds". (Edit: Apparently they don't get confused, see two comments below.)
A group of Romans walks into a bar. One of them holds up 2 fingers and says "Five beers please".
+Eric Southard Guy walks into a bar and says "Give me ten times more beers than this guy!". The barkeeper replies "Well, now, THAT'S an order of magnitude!"
Roman. You have to wonder how they ever managed to make a Europe wide civilisation lasting 1.2 milennia with that counting System.
Eric Southard & Bluemon Where did you learn English? You do not have two plurals in one sentence. It's "A group of Romans *walk* into a bar."
I'm sorry, my OCD compelled me to correct you both ;)
OK, there may be occasions with compound sentences where two plurals may occur but for here this short correction will suffice :)
Galbi 3000 The s in walks is not a plural, it's just the singular third-person conjugation.
Ieah Leen i think both are correct
1:42
I'm sorry, did he just push up his IMAGINARY glasses?
Maybe he has in contacts. Lots of people who switch from glasses to contacts will continue to try to push up their glasses for years after. Sort of the same thing as a phantom limb.
@@mrsandman1924 Props to you for knowing what a phantom limb is ^^
Loveless Catzee I do that sometimes when I’m not wearing my glasses
@@CaseyShontz Same, mostly in the shower.
@@_catzee who doesn't know what a phantom limb is? It's common knowledge
Tom referenced the Star Trek: TNG episode “The Chase” when he mentioned all species came from the same ancestor... that’s pretty a deep cut.
Came here to ask that - thanks for the reference!
When he stopped himself and added that, I was pleasantly surprised. The man knows his lore.
I thought this was pretty common knowledge. I spend too much time on Memory α.
The reference to the movie Contact was pretty obscure, too
trekkies BTFO
Count up to 2047 on just your fingers with one simple trick! CS majors love it, and you’ll hit every possible state your fingers can be in! All you have to do is count in binary!
@SQ38 Yes. If you use your feet, you can go up to 1048575 (2^20-1).
I tend to only go up to 255 on my fingers so that I can avoid flipping anybody off, which is still significantly better than 10.
@SQ38 that's assuming that just one of your pinkies is up and the rest of your fingers are down. You can represent 2047 with multiple fingers.
I will feel sorry for whoever dares to do 132 on their fingers in binary
I like to keep it simple by only counting up to 30 on my fingers.
132 you
Reddit discussion: redd.it/2y505w
I like this new guy!
TheFifaHawk And he's actually mentioned on his facebook page of the video that this'll be his last numberphile video, since as he said, is a linguist. But check out his youtube channel! He's got heaps of videos on a wide range of topics and they're all pretty great!
Yeah Okeay
TheFifaHawk Regular on Computerphile
Derek Schwalenberg SuperbowlL does look funny though!
@ Star Trek, one of the old pc games they had a Mission involving two ancient races with different numeric systems, base 3 and base 4 and you had to solve a riddle involving 'translating' information between the systems. I found it really cool back then and though what could have been the reason for it.
If you ever remember which Star Trek game has the numeric base conversion, I would love it if you'd post it.
@@ZipplyZane just found it: Star Trek 25th Aniversary, Episode 6 (the parts of the games are called episodes), That Old Devil Moon. You can search for the walkthrough, perhaps there is even a video for it here
And it was base 2 and 3
I remember that puzzle being my first introduction to different bases. I was in elementary school at the time so it was years before I encountered it in math classes.
Some of the Cyan games involved base puzzles as well. Riven used a child's game (involving prisoners being fed to a whale shark, which says its own story about the setting) and other clues in a classroom to teach their base 5/25 system and later used it in other puzzles. Obduction used a base 4 system that was relatively simple once you got it but it was displayed graphically on machines that had autocorrect and an odd layout, so if you started down the wrong path figuring it out it was easy to get lost.
I remember when my brother and I played Riven we got to that part and then went what we thought was far beyond what they required, just being math nerds and seeing what we could figure out with the number logic. Puzzles in the moment were just "can you count to 5" so the rest was superfluous world building. Until the very end of the game, when a code is written in the more complex system we'd figured out already.
When I was in first grade I learned a system of counting on my hands called Chisanbop. You use the 4 normal fingers of your dominant hand as digits 1-4, thumb is 5 so you can count up to 9 on one hand. the other hand is the same except multiplied by 10. you can count up to 99 on your fingers.
I had to learn that too, but considering we only used it for a short time, I quickly forgot about it.
I use it all the time, as I learned it alongside the Japanese abacus.
Why would you have multiple fingers for 1?
@@diegoconnolly5317 Simplicity?
With his vague description I was able to easily grasp it and relatively quickly count and identify numbers with it.
Way better than the base 2 people who think it's at all convenient to have a 10 bit number on your hands and convert that to base 10 in your head.
I use something similar, except I just extend and retract fingers in a wave, like so:
..... = 0
!.... = 1
!!... = 2
!!!.. = 3
!!!!. = 4
!!!!! = 5
.!!!! = 6
..!!! = 7
...!! = 8
....! = 9
Tom Scott in Numberphile? How had I not seen this before? I LOVED it!!
same, this is beautiful
@@AlexandrBorschchev *replies after 3 years*
"I apologise to Denmark"
Welcome to the opposite of a Lemmino video.
@@van-hieuvo8208 He jokingly despises Danes in his videos, so he would never apologise.
Rød grød med fløde
Must be Swedish.
@@kristoffer9400 Indeed!
1:03 that makes so much sense, I would always think “the Declaration of Independence was signed way more than 47 years before the civil war”
yup, a score is twenty!
There are some videos on CZcams I just can't stop watching over and over.
And Tom Scott is in most of them.
I want Languangephile or Linguistphile... first video: what's the proper name?
+batfan1939 This.
+batfan1939 Tom Scott has his own channel where he goes into whatever he wants, maybe you can find some language-based stuff there.
Tom Scott's own channel has many videos on the subject of language.
+Sergei Rachmaninoff 7 videos.
+batfan1939 check out the channel Xidnaf
"otteoghalvtreds" or in other words "I have never heard of a functioning number system"
Bruh stfu. If you have an anime pic your opinion doesnt matter.
I would argue the one making the silly points around the words knows very little about cultural linguistics.
I'm not Danish. I understand some Danish sure, but I've never heard these. Nonetheless it's obvious these words have implicit meanings that are intuitively understood by the culture expressing them, and that they are not literal instructions for math as seemingly suggested.
It's clear these words have far more to do with linguistic style rather than numbering or numerals. It's a shame to see a mathematician treating them with such literal meaning.
Kristoffer Clausen Det var en joke jeg ved ikke om du forstod det
@@SmellyJoe1
if this comment was something else, i would've actually chuckled at it.
Stfu weeb
Keep Calm and Kling On, probably the only "Keep Calm and..." joke that I've actually thought was funny
exactly what i thought
ur'anuSDaq lubavtaHbogh tlhIngan 'ar Dalegh? (yuQvam 'oH Sol Soch'e')
I have a friend from Norway and when he visited I said I would meet him at 'half 3' - he turned up at 14:30 i.e half of 3 o'clock. I turned up at 15:30 - he was a bit grumpy.
Half OF three would be half past 1. You mean half TO three. Which is also how they do it in Germany, if I remember from school correctly.
PiousMoltar Yes Germans use half to the hour where we use half past the hour. Safer to use 3:30 or even 15:30
@@PiousMoltar Chris never said 'half of three', he said 'half three'. As Tom explained in the video, 'half-X' in Danish means 'X minus 0.5', not 'X times 0.5'. I assume Chris is saying that the same is true of Norwegian (which is nice to know, if hardly surprising).
Catalan has a similar thing with time - it gets to one o'clock, then it's one quarter of two (un quart de dos), two quarters of two, three quarters of two, two. And, yes, in German 'half three' (3:30) would be 'halb vier' (= 'half four')
Also Afrikaans (South Africa): "half drie" directly translates to "half three" in English, but means half past two. Imagine the confusion for our poor schoolkids, for whom English and Afrikaans are the two major official languages (of 11 total), and for most of them neither is their home language.
Så fint!
So happy to see Tom Scott!!
Samyak us too!
the "og" in otteoghalvtreds means "and"
Yeah he said that.
Tryo The Pyro he did not. he said it was just to link it together and to ignore it. so i just explained what it meant
what he sayd was he thinked the o in og was part of the word for 8 and the g linked it together
vilket efterblivet språk
femtioåtta
femtioåtta
femtioåtta
I love rewatching this video every year or so. It was probably one of the first things to really open my eyes to the weird and wonderful world of linguistics and culture.
In Greenland we have a very wierd counting system: ataaseq (one), marluk (two), pingasut (three), sisamat (four), tallimat (five), arfinillit (six), arfineq-marluk (second six), arfineq-pingasut (third six), arfineq-sisamat (fourth six), qulit (ten), aqqanillit (eleven), aqqaneq-marluk (second eleven), aqqaneq-pingasut (third eleven), aqqaneq-sisamat (fourth eleven), aqqaneq-tallimat (fifth eleven), arfersanillit (sixteen), arfersaneq-marluk (second sixteen), arfersaneq-pingasut (third sixteen), arfersaneq-sisamat (fourth sixteen), inuk naallugu (twenty, which literaly means 'the whole body' (fingers and toes)). I think it is in base 5, idk.
Seems like they wanted it to be base 5 but couldn't stop using base 10.
Really, what a weird system.
Yes, this system seems to be essentially base five. Also, you seem to think the numbers six, eleven and sixteen are very significant since you use them to form other numbers. That jibes with using "the whole body" as the word for 20, since when finger counting six is the number when you move to your other hand and sixteen is when you move to your other foot. Eleven is when you jump from your hands to your feet. Base five system with origins in finger-counting. Fairly normal on the whole, actually.
Sophie Jones The six feels like the “infinity” in children’s play for who can think of a bigger number: A: “infinity”, B: “infinity plus 1”... A: “omega”, B: “omega plus 1”...
I count my fingers in binary. Since I have 10 fingers with two possible states (down and up), I can count to 1023 on both hands. You could say it's pretty... handy.
Note: I can count to 31 on one hand. Just so you don't have to do the math.
I consider the states 'down' and 'up' as 0 and 1 respectively, the first finger is 1, the second is 2, third is 4, fourth is 8, etc., and you just have to add up the values.
You can get up to 4 bits per finger (maybe more?) if you fold them in weird ways
*****
I've managed three definite positions with my fingers: Fully down, bent, and up. The rest seems like it would have the same problem as actual electronics where it would be hard to define the difference between, for example, 3 and 4 in base 10. It would also probably be hard to accomplish without external support (For example your other hand, reducing the fingers you can use by 5 and therefore nullifying the additional numbers achieved by the positions.)
Based on that my son came up with the notion that "4" is an obscene number when he was about 13...
So if you use your toes, you can count to 1048575
anosmianAcrimony
Theoretically.
Watch the words:
English:
Million: 1,000,000
Billion: 1,000,000,000
Trillion: 1,000,000,000,000
Quadrillion: 1,000,000,000,000,000
German:
Millionen: 1.000.000
Milliarden: 1.000.000.000
Billionen: 1.000.000.000.000
Billiarden: 1.000.000.000.000.000
...and only THEN comes the german trillion (Trillionen).
We also use quad and quint but way later because we have 2 "stages" for each of them.
Except you forgot billion so they're all off. Would be nice actually if they did line up and billion was used for 1,000,000.
French also does the million milliard thing. I believe the UK did/does as well.
+Kyle Kafka Woops, human error at its best. Corrected it.
But hey, you messed up too! ;)
1,000,000 isn't billion. It's million.
+TKay no I was saying that it would be nice if we got rid of million and started with billion in its place. That way there's two groups of 000's in 1,000,000 and bi means two. And then trillion (tri means 3) would be 1,000,000,000.
Kyle Kafka Gotcha. Yeah that would be logical but...it developed that way for a reason.
Now don't ask me what the reason is. ;)
BigBen Hebdomadarius ( his :) ) Thanks, will do. Do you really think it's complicated?
You don’t even need to go so far as China, even in American Sign Language 6-10 are still shown with a single hand.
6-10? What about 11-19, arguably 20, without having to make more signs? (To sign 21, you do 2 then 1.)
Use binary
In Irish sign language, the signs for 11-19 all require movement.
In switzerland soixante-dix is septante,
quatre-vingt-dix is nonante and in some areas of switzerland (not all) there's even a huitante which is quatre-vingt
Septante comes from old french setante.
Huitante comes from old french uitante.
Nonante comes from old french nonante. The spelling of this number hasn't changed.
Damn, never thought of it that way, I think I'm gonna start confusing my French friends by using these...
Again, same in Belgium
And what exactly is a septante, a nonante and whatever that other one was?
@@RajA-jw7dd can you confirm this? I'm Canadian and we never learned about this in French class, but then again it's sort of a more general take on French(often times we learn the same word used in France and Québec)
@@THEPELADOMASTER septante = 70
octante = 80
nonante = 90
You can also count with your fingers in base two- it's hillariously confusing to people who don't know what you are doing.
Wyrd80 1023 potential numbers! Or 1048575 if you use your toes
4 can be a little problematic in North America, or 2 if you counting a byte.
P.S. Base 16 is the superior counting system.
Binary is base 2. Using binary code with your fingers will probably make people think you have some sort of mental condition lol.
saying 4 in binary with your fingers can really insult someone :D
I showed a friend to count in binary starting with index and ending with thumb so 2 is the bird and now as an inside joke we say 2 as an insult and people get really confused.
WTF, I thought you were the programmer/encryption guy. Stop switching majors on me!
+GotEide not necessarily, even though computers do stuff in base 2, you never type 1s and 0s when coding. Programming languages are more or less lots of words and brackets xD
+j0h00 Gotta check your assembly buddy xD Not that many words and brackets, and a considerable amount of 1s and 0s.
I think most assemblers support hexadecimal, decimal and binary, but disassemblers usually show hexadecimal.
there are 58 likes ahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!
Most programming languages are dialects of pidgin English.
"We've agreed on Arabic numerals now" - writes a 7 the way many Europeans write 1.
…are you daft?! Look at the font! 1 has a small hook, sure, but 7 has the diagonal!!!
I used to write a 7 kind of like that, then after a trip to Europe I started crossing my sevens and still do (its unambiguous no matter who's reading it), but I don't put a big hook on the 1 as in Europe.
"Watch a british guy try to explain crore and lakh" should have been the name of the video. LOL
One lakh is 100,000.
One crore is 100 lakhs or 1, 00, 00, 000
I thought he might also mention how the British used to use the long scale billion (10^12) while America uses the short scale billion (10^9), which is now normal usage in both countries.
MrID36 That's already been discussed in another Numberphile video.
Nillie Thanks. It's possible that I've seen it, but it didn't come to mind while I was commenting.
MrID36 How big is a billion? if u wanna see ;)
I still use long scale outside of official things. It just seems more natural, a thousand thousand is a million so a million million is a billion.
Well, in German it goes from million to milliarde to billion. And from there to billiarde to trillion to trilliarde. See the problem when translating large numbers to English?
In Japan, they have a word for ten thousand, which means that one million is spoken as 100 ten thousands.
Mandarin does the same thing I believe
Same with Chinese.
It's because they use groups of 10^4, rather than 10^3, so there are unique words for 10, 100, 1000, 10000 and then it wraps to 10 * 10^4, 100 * 10^4, 1000 * 10^4 then a new word for 10^8.
So that's why the Japanese version of the Pokémon move Thunderbolt is 10,000 volts.
***** In the original Japanese Ash actually says 100,000 volts (十万ボルト), I guess they thought 10,000 sounded better in English.
5:54 Actually in India we group them in twos till Crore and then we group the zeroes of the crore(i.e 1 crore ,10 crore , 100 crore) and we follow the same pattern of twos after that
Yeah right, that 10^7 was actually ten lakhs.
@@divyanshimishra7915 10 lakh would be 10^6
Honestly I hate this system of Lakhs and Crores. Every time CZcams shows me views in Lakhs and Crores I have to convert them into Millions. And I didn't know what a Lakh Crore is until I saw this
@@mukul863 I am indian and CZcams shows me views in millions and billions instead of lakhs and crores ......... This caused me to get used to millions and billions...... Like 10 lakh is a million ... And 10 million is a crore ..... And 100 crore is a billion ..
Oh yeah, Danish numbers, the second biggest _"why haven't they changed yet to something more sane yet"_ I encountered while learning Danish.
The biggest is that spoken language is nowhere near the written language.
Leo Wattenberg In Norway we (well, they, since I wasn't born yet) switched from saying numbers like 21 as "en-og-tyve" or "en-og-tjue" to saying "tjue-en" in 1951. The decision was mostly made to reduce errors in phone numbers, but it has made the number system much more coherent. (Mainly getting rid of the "unit in the middle" problem with the hundreds, because a sensible number system need to have the digits spoken in strict ascending or descending order of significance.)
My friends and I often joke that Dansk Sprognævn must be permanently drunk because the way they have decided Danish should be spelled is so inconsistently that we've managed to make it harder to learn than Mandarin Chinese for foreign speakers, and we spend 10 years educating our children in spelling and even then we have a hard time getting it right.
How did we manage this with Latin characters? Mind blowing.
IshayuG By creating three more, that's how. x)
Nillie Which language? Bokmål or Nynorsk, or both?
Leo Wattenberg Both, though "tyve" was mostly bokmål/riksmål from what I understand.
-hey dude
-what?
-58
-w-wait, did you said 58? It c-can't be... I'm... I'M SO CONFUSED GAAAAH!!!
oh ok
58 in Danish: otteoghalvtreds - eight*and*half-third
68 - otteogtreds
78 - otteoghalvfjerds (half-fourth)
88 - otteogfirs
98 - otteoghalvfems (half-fifth)
+Kim Philipp Möllgaard jeg hater maydayer, det verste jeg vet er maydayer!
I'm danish, and must admit that I still get confused by the reverse order of the digits once in a while. Like, the number 1234 is "ettusindetohundredefireogtredive" which is essentially like saying "one thousand two hundred four and thirty". The germans and dutch do this too.
Fun fact: Chinese and japanese people don't use a 1000 separator but rather a 10000 separator, so you'll see very large numbers written as "123 0000 0000 0000".
Det er ikke helt rigtigt, 60 staves uden 'd' (altså 'tres' i stedet for 'treds' som man gør i 'halvtreds), da det jo blot er tre snes, mens halvtreds er halv tredje snes.
Thanks. I don't know why I keep forgetting that.
Danish spelling is generally a nightmare.
And another comment of correction as well: The second 'o' isnt part of the 'eight' but with the g spelling the danish word 'og' which means 'and'. So it becomes 'eight-and-half....'.
"Super Bowl L" 😂
When is the super bowl not an L though?
SUPER BOWLL
You just won the NFC championship. Now you can go to L.
Not only did they decline to do that, but the preceding year they didn’t do “Super Bowl IL”, opting for “Super Bowl XLIX”.
Base 12 is easily counted on one hand using the thumb to count the joints of the remaining four fingers.
They have that in the base 12 video.
also you can use your other hand to talley dussins
you can count binary if you say finger stretched out = 1 and finger tucked in = 0
I know this comment is a year late but in Vietnam we do count this way. Not so much for the young people but my parent generation does this still. This is how my mum counts.
Use the base of the fingers as well and you get base 16
I can't like this video enough
Oskar Kylvåg well hope you share it around then!
Numberphile will do!
+Oskar Kylvåg In danish that would mean you don't like it. ''I can't like it'' = ''I don't like it''
That doesn't surprise me. The scandinavian languages *are* pretty similar. :)
+Bison Ware No it wouldn't. "I can't like this enough" = "Jeg kan ikke lide dette nok". The "enough" = "nok" at the end makes the difference in both English and Danish. Just realized this is an old comment; I don't care.
This is hillarious to watch as a dane :D
And yes while we mock the US for their imperial outdated measuring, we silently ignore our horrible number system
Yep. In Denmark it got to the point where our banks went "screw this shit!" and decided to change the number system - so they will say femti instead of halvtreds, because it consists of fem and ti, literally five-ten, so 58 would then be femtiotte, which makes a ton more sense. The Swedes already use this in every day speech as well.
We also have halvfjerds, which is 70 and halvfems, which is 90. Same idea as with 50.
And let's not forget we of course swap around the two rightmost digits in the number, and we use the long system (so we have milliards and billiards and so on)
It is so funny.
i have a set of jokes for it (norwegian here).
tres = 60.
Now divide that by 2, and you get half a tres which is 50.
firs = 80.
divide by 2 and now you have hald a firs which is 70.
I know it really isn't like that as Tom scott explained, but i cant stop laughing at this!
oaaserud By the same logic, two "halvannenlitersflasker" (common Norwegian phrase that literally means "half-second-litre bottles", i.e. bottles of volume 1.5l) should have a total volume of two litres. It may not be *quite* as strange as Danish, but please don't pretend Norwegian is a particularly logical language- it's a nice language, sure, but not a logical one.
The half-to-the-next terminology doesn't stop there, though: a similar terminology is used in a wide variety of languages when talking about time. For instance, in English, "half-five" in reference to the time of day means half and hour past the five hour mark in that particular 12- or 24- hour cycle, i.e. 5:30; not halfway between the starting point of said cycle and five o' clock. By contrast, a near identical phrase exists in Norwegian, but there "halv fem" would mean halfway to five o' clock from the last hour before that, i.e. 4:30. Sure, there is a logic behind both phrases, but both are based on widely understood subtext and only really logical in terms of modular arithmetic.
John Smith almost the same, "halvannen" is short for half and another pretty much. one half, and then a whole.
Norwegian is stolen from the danish language, and danish from german/english i believe?
I'm not saying every other language on the planet is genius and perfect.
I merely said that i find the danish counting system particulary funny :-)
I wouldn't say that Danish (or other complex numbering systems) are horrible; they're simply made under linguistic pretenses instead of molded to ease of context.
I'm not saying this is the answer, but sometimes a language is made complex in order to dissuade foreigners from learning the intricacies so a native can note a difference between a local and a foreigner. Could be for war purposes (to make it harder to decipher) or simply to create a form of elitism.
I grew up learning English, took classes in high school to learn a fair amount of Spanish, and dabbled in Japanese in college...after looking at Dutch, I laughed and said, "no thanks."
I developed my own way of counting on my hands. Right fingers are 1, right thumb is 5. Left fingers/thumb are 10/50. So I can count up to 99 on two hands. I've been doing it that way for years, and it's just second nature/muscle memory for me now.
haven't thought of that as well
Congratulations, you've got all the hand gestures from 1 to 10 correctly!
Yes, but only in certain part of China. In Hong Kong, the hand gesture for 1 to 10 is not the same as in the video, in particular, 7 and 8 are different.
Surprised he didn't even mention the groupings of four digits used in japanese (and maybe some other close languages) : man / ten thousand (1,0000), oku / hundred million (1,0000,0000), chō / trillion (1,0000,0000,0000), kei / ten quadrillion (1,0000,0000,0000,0000), gai / hundred quintillion (1,0000,0000,0000,0000,0000)...
Japanese doesn't have any close languages unless you count Ryukyuan
Elatheod same for China and Korea if iirc
"Why wasn't MY favorite language included?!" because the video is supposed to be examples. not a full listing.
Al least Japanese has fixed length groups. The mentioned groups of 2 and 3 are already more 'exotic'.
Besides, I find a base 27 language far more surprising and more proving his point, than giving an exhaustive list of which groupings all base 10 languages use.
"Japanese" You mean chinese.
Korea got chinese letters and by extension their counting system from China, and Japan got the same Chinese system from Korea.
Ikr, I’m learning Japanese and I find them interesting. It’s something like French at first? For example, 五 (go) is the symbol for 5, and 十 (jyuu) is the symbol for 10. 15 is 十五 (jyuu-go), and 50 is 五十 (gojyuu), and 55 is 五十五 (gojyuu-go). I don’t know much about it yet so correct me if I’m wrong.
It's so strange that this video came out, i was just pondering this yesterday...
I'd say that numbers are universal because they can be converted from any base with 100% accuracy. The same isn't true for words. Numbers retain their meaning forever, as words can change, take on new meaning, and so on. Metric and Imperial is a great example of this, you just need to be aware that a conversion is required. I don't think you can convert any one language to another with 100% accuracy, you will always lose something in the translation. Sometimes it's very minor, other times it's very large. Usually from cultural influences. I'll use jokes as an example of this. You can translate a joke from one language to another, and even with a very accurate translation, the joke can be lost or just not make sense and all you will see are the words themselves, but not the meaning behind them. Again, numbers don't have this problem. As long as you understand the formula you will always understand the translation.
With words, you might not even have a counterpart for a foreign word in your language. But with numbers, there is always a counterpart, with maybe the exception of zero and infinity. (you can't convert 0 into roman numerals but you can add it to them) But zero and infinity are a bit of a gray area. 0 by itself is really the lack of a number and infinity is every possible number. (infinity can be hard to define but i try to think of it as the exact opposite of zero) 0 is a very strange number when you think about it, it would sort of be like considering spaces between words to be a word itself.
I think i've thought way too much about this... Anyways, i'd love to hear your thoughts on this (or anyone elses)
*Edit* Also as an aside. Numbers are much more static. By this i mean.. If you take English and export it to another part of the world, within just a few decades it may become incomprehensible to the people who exported it due to the fluid nature of words... But If you export a number system to another part of the world, it's will change very little. It could have some new additions to it, but it's core will remain intact. The number 1 will mean the same hundreds if not thousands of years into the future. The symbols likely won't change. This isn't universal but it's far closer to it than words ever will be, or should be.
I like the way you think, and I largely, though not entirely, agree. Let me first adress the matter of words and translation, a topic close to my heart:
I way I see it, there are two main problems with the idea "perfect translation": firstly, that it assumes that the verbal formulation in the original language perfectly captures the meaning it conveys. Wittgenstein makes some brilliant points about this in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and if you're interested in these things, I'd recommend reading the whole thing, but the basic point I'm trying to make here is that what one says is never a perfect representation of what one actually means. Language simply isn't flexible enough. There is an infinite amount of things to say, but only so many ways to say it (verbally, at least). Only if each configuration of words had exactly one meaning, and captured that meaning perfectly and objectively, could one even begin to consider the possibility that there is an exact equivalent in any other language. The second problem I wanted to address is related, but slightly different: whereas the first problem was based around how the meaning behind any message is too complex to be perfectly captured in words, this one is based on how any word or configuration of words has connotations beyond their intended meaning in any one context. If you for instance say "Nice weather today", that phrase has cultural, emotional, seasonal, regional, social and about a billion other types of connotations way beyond the hypothetical connotation-less remark that the weather is, in fact, nice. On the other hand, going back to the first problem, some of these connotations may have been part of your intended meaning in uttering that phrase, but are not inherently a part of the hypothetical ideal meaning of the phrase, and as such may very well not exist in equivalent statements in other languages, *certainly* not in the same configuration and to the exact same extent. It may seem similar, even to the point of getting the intended points across to a satisfactory degree or even being virtually indistinguishable from the original message, but it will never actually be the exact same message. Then again, a similar argument can of course be made for no two individuals ever conveying messages perfectly between them; and indeed, Wittgenstein makes just that case; not to mention that I might be argued to not sufficiently distinguish between identity and equality, but that's a timeless philosophical debate I'm not prepared to involve myself in further at this time.
Anyway, this is the part where I finally get to the point: Everything I've said thus far fits fairly well with what you said about language. However, when it comes to numbers, you seem to assume that numbers exist in a state similar to the hypothetical, objective, ideal state I talked about with regards to words; that numbers neither have connotations nor are used as approximate representations of more complex meanings, and as such aren't subject to the aforementioned problems. With all due respect, I strongly disagree. Numbers may seem objective and universal when employed in formulas to describe the ways of the Universe, and one might well say that the *idea* of numbers behaves in just that way, but whenever numbers are actually employed, the human mind seems completely incapable of not giving them connotations and/or using them to represent more than their objective, fundamental meaning. As a very crude example, if I say "42", both my intentions behind saying it, the conveyed message and the resulting interpretation and reaction is likely to be coloured by a lot more than just the objective concept the number is "supposed" to represent, and these ideas beyond the fundamental concept of the number seem likely to be just as impossible to translate perfectly as are their counterparts with regards to words.
Anyway, it was interesting reading your comment on the topic, and thank you for the invitation to give you my two cents on the matter; these are things I really enjoy discussing. It would be great to hear your opinion on my reply, though please don't feel obliged to give it if you don't want to; I know that I get a bit carried away sometimes, which many find either overwhelming or outright boring.
'The symbols likely won't change.' The symbols vary a lot, even now.
Does 1 have a head? does it have a base? or is it just a simple straight line?
Does 3 have a flat top? Does it descend under the baseline?
Does 4 form an angle at the top or is it open? does it descend under the baseline?
Is the head of a 5 a second line or is the number drawn like an s?
Does 7 have a cross bar
Does 9 have a curly tail or a straight one? Does it descend under the baseline and basically look like a g?
Is 0 round like an O or tall and thin? Does it have a diagonal line across the inside?
Does a decimal point belong on the baseline where a period would be or half way up?
Does the multiplication bullet operator belong half way up or on the baseline?
Is the division symbol an obelus(÷)[This symbol has also been used to represent subtraction in Northern Europe.], a slash(/) or a colon(:) ?
i base my math on pi. not so easily converted to any other base but....pi
JNCressey You're taking my quote out of context. The context was "within a few decades" Then i added that they *could* last for thousands of years. Western culture has been using Arabic numerals for over a thousand years already. There has been additions, minor changes but their core has remained intact. And they likely will last for another thousand years or more. (though the last part is an assumption based on the trend)
You are right that they do vary, but not by much. My point is that they're much more static than words are.
But to have gotten to that part of my comment that you quoted, you must of read that whole thing, and thank you for that.
geneticallyinferior1 Pi can be a base? I'm far from a math wiz. Even if you could show me that pie can be used as a base.. i'd probably never understand it lol. I'll take your word for it though
I have been a numberphile subscriber for over 6 years this is the most intriguing video I've ever seen. Word people doing numbers is amazing. I love this. Thank you.
I'm Danish, and I never figured out why the word for "Fifty" is "halvtreds" when the word for "sixty" is "tres" (pronounced the same, and you never see the spelling anywhere). Which would be 30, not 50. I figured they'd simply changed from a sexagesimal to a decimal system, and borrowed the word for 30 to mean 50. And I knew "halvtredsinstyve" was a word, but I thought it was a colloquialism, like "fiftyish".
This makes so much more sense... Except for the weird "half" meaning "the next number minus one half".
One just gets used to the nonsensical things about language. I'm happy to know that people think Danish is funny. ;)
+Emil Sørensen Also, the pronounciation was okay. :) Just pretend like you're a Dutch person when you say it. (More people know what they sound like :D )
+Emil Sørensen Actually you already use that weird half thing whenever you say "halvanden" and in that light the weird thing is more why we just call the first one "en halv" and not "halvførste"
+Zlish do you mean "en en halv"
dansk skidrov
Kenneth Nielsen Nope.
The 'Chinese hand gestures' can vary quite a bit depending where you go and who you ask (btw he did them quite well). I believe those originated from accountants and merchants who didn't want competitors overhearing their conversation, so naturally there was no nation wide standards.
"Keep Calm and Kling On"
Glorious.
I’m learning Japanese and came across this quite a lot! They use a combination of Arabic numerals and their own script (same as China) and their hand symbols are sometimes different too, a closed hand represents 5 and an open one represents zero, so you count how many fingers are DOWN rather than up (however this is purely for counting, not to show one particular number)
Also similar to comma separators, they have a word for 10 thousand so instead of saying million you say hundred ten thousand so some maths is required to just translate the words for numbers.
8:27 "keep calm and kling on" 😂
I enjoyed this video way more than I should have...
Because of the linguistics or because of the math? 😂
I'm not sure... I was expecting to get mind melted because of either... but pleasantly, was not.
KEEP CALM AND KLING ON
yooooo
Klingons on the starboard bow ...
Scrape them off, Jim
Awesome video. Love the energy and the genuinity that is transmitted, also how the admiration for the things you explain come across... If that makes sense.... :)
in the lowland areas of Tłon they have a number system based on prime factorization . They have a symbol for one a symbol for prime that encloses other numbers . the first ten number wok something like this
1 1
2 (1)
3 ((1))
4 (1)(1)
5 (((1)))
6 (1)((1))
7 ((1)(1))
8 (1)(1)(1)(1) or (1)-((1)) they have a sort of power symbol.
9 ((1))((1))
10 (1)(((1)))
They use it mostly for magic and horoscopes as it is very difficult to add and subtract in it.Easy to multiply and divide though.
I've been wondering if someone had come up with a system like this. I'd like to see it written graphically, rather than using ascii to approximate it.
It looks like a googological Array notation xd
Where...
1 = 1
(1) = 2
((1)) = 3
(((1))) = 4
((((1)))) = 5
(1)1 = ω
((1))1 = ω+1
Ok I am getting ahead of myself here
I can grasp only lakh and crore. even when I read million and Billion, I convert in my mind to get the scale of the number
The cool thing is, they all derive from Indo European.
dekm > Sanskrit daśa, Greek deka, Latin decem
kmtom > Sanskrit śatam, Greek (he)katon, Latin centum
(sm)gheslom > Sanskrit sahasra, Greek khilioi, Latin mille
Indo Europeans could apparently count up to a 9999. In India, the system was expanded with laksha, koti etc., in Greek with myrias (10,000) and in modern Europe with million etc. (from Latin mille). But they all originate in the same system.
Same here, it just flows naturally from ten thousands to lakh to ten lakhs to crore. It feels like an extension of the metric system, while million and billion feel like completely arbitrary numbers.
@@aoarashi3025 Yeah I have always been wondering that, why is it thousand? why not ten hundred. then I learned that Americans actually do that, only to learn that they then go from ten hundred to ten thousand, which makes absolutely no sense (but then imperial system, what'd you expect)
But then lakh is just as weird, because it's not 10000.
@@patrickkeller2193 yeah, the ten hundred - ten thousand switch in American English is a bit confusing sometimes. It seems sensible to me to have a different term for 10^4, rather than ten thousand or hypothetically hundred hundred, but that doesn't seem to be a thing.
Ten hundred is mostly a verbal thing here, I think. When I see 1200, I think "one thousand, two hundred," but I _say_ "twelve hundred." It's shorter and flows easier. Once you hit 2000, it goes back to thousands - people won't say "twenty hundred".
From a linguistics standpoint, sure, numbers aren't expressed universally and cultures don't think in the same bases or written forms, but ratios of physical quantities hold up regardless of your number and unit systems. That is what is meant by math being the universal language: Not that 1+2=2 but that there exists a constant we know as PI, for example, and the properties of ideal geometric shapes such as parabolas and triangles. It doesn't matter if you decide that a circle is made from 257 * 1/21759 unicorn horn parts or whatever. It will only matter when the system of math one party uses limits its ability to comprehend the relationship the other party is trying to communicate.
6:07 As someone who grew up there, absolute not. The lakh-crore system gets really annoying, especially at higher numbers
Koreans count in "ten-thousands" or Man- Eok, etc
1.0000.0000,00
+Steve Lee So how many views does the Gangnam Style video have when converted into this system?
a lot lol
With all due respect koreans never really cared about Gangnam Style. Psy was popular decades before and he had MUCH better songs before and after it
+Steve Lee Japanese does this as well, but only when using kanji. Numerals are written in threes.
***** So for example, if you loaned $100,000 to purchase a house, in the American/European system you would say you loaned "100 Thousand" Dollars
But Koreans would say you loaned $10,0000, or "10 Man" Dollars" with 1 Man = 10000
It's not so much the kanji that foreigners are likely to encounter (though a foreigner in Japan will encounter numbers written in kanji sooner or later) but just how numbers are said verbally. They obviously don't count in English even if numbers are often written the Western way, so in spoken Japanese, one hundred thousand is pretty much "ten ten-thousands" which is likely to trip you up (especially for larger numbers) even if you stay as far away from kanji as possible.
Darmok and julad at tanagra.
Temba! His arms wide!
Temba, his fist closed.
When the walls fell
@@forbidden-cyrillic-handle you may unfortunately be correct.
@@forbidden-cyrillic-handle harambe at the zoo arms wide. Me sad.
That was a wonderful blend between language and numbers.... nice... this guy is kinda funny
His channel is great, you should check it out. Tom Scott.
Otteoghalvtres "that's numberwang! "
I'm surprised I had to scroll this far for a Numberwang. Let's rotate the board!
YEEEEEES
11
56
4
29
4
83
4
That’s numberwang!
The thousands separator often confused me because where I'm from, we simply do not use any thousands separator. Sure in textbooks the groups of three will maybe be slightly separated by a little space, but that isn't universal. And when writing by hand or typing on a computer, we leave no spaces, we put no separators, one million is simply 1000000 and that's it. So in fact, not even the very existence of the separators are universal, some don't use any :)
Edit: grammar :P
6:05 as a person who did grow up with that system, I find the usual thousand seperator more convenient.
This is definitely not as complicated as the number systems mentioned here, but I find it fascinating that Filipinos--or at least, Tagalogs--rarely use Tagalog words for numbers. We might when talking about things fewer than ten, but more than that, we often switch to either English or Spanish. We use English in casual conversation, but when talking about money, or time, we often use Spanish until we reach a hundred. At a hundred or more, we often use English.
I've just gone full circle. I was watching Tom Scott's channel. Something interesting popped up in the suggestions, from The Map Men. This led me to a Numberphile video. And that led me back to Tom Scott.
What you have done there sir, is called “falling down the CZcams rabbit hole” 😅
YES TOM SCOTT
Ily man you're awesome
Not terribly pronounced, just that that "og" means "and"
@@EchoHeo and Norwegian and swedish
I'm seriously shaking my head at "Keep Calm and Kling On."
If anyone is interested :-
In India we use the marks on our fingers to count (and do simple maths) starting from the base of the little finger counting till 12. The marks on the other hand can be used to mark the number of repetitions.
Now I am sure that it is certainly not 'universal'.
Finland doesn’t use a full stop to separate thousands; we use a space to do that, we don’t use a full stop for anything, really. But we do use a comma to separate the decimals. For example: ”1 000,72”. 🇫🇮
Another fun way to keep tally is by counting on base 2 on your fingers. You can get up to 2^10 (1024) doing that.
1023*
Alwin Priven Okay, I see where I messed up. There are 1024 different numbers you can represent with your fingers, but it starts counting at zero.
I love the persons passion when he's talking!!
I'm from South Asia and grew up with the Lakh-Crore system. In school I thought we used to put two digits in each group in the past, but made the last group three digits long because of the British influence from colonial times. But then I learned it had actually been like that long before the Brits came along.
Superbowl 50? What the L?
Vicente Ramirez I think that pun went clear over your head :P
Now I wanna see the original comment :P
B.K. Price Their logos for Superbowl 50 and 51 erroneously included an extra I because they didn't realize they drew the trophy like a letter without using it as one.
You just won the conference championship. Now... go to L.
Maybe it is because L means 50 in Roman ?
in Hindi we have a series of prefixes and suffixes similar to English.for ex
chae=6
bees=20
tees=30
chabbees=chae + bees=26
(6 and 20)
chattees=chae + tees=36
(6 and 30)
the only weird ones are the _9 which are in the form oon+ which means 1less
oontees is 29 so one less than 30(tees).
like how IX means one less than 10
i was pondering over the order of numbers in languages; it somewhat appeared to me, that in English it makes more sense as the numbers are said in the order you type them: "thirty-six" "3 6"
in German it is the same as in yours: "sechs und dreissig" "six and thirty"
(not the _9 part, tho ["neun und dreissig"])
It's only different word until 20, and then it follows that pattern. But in Kannada and Sanskrit, it's exactly like English.
And this summarizes Bengali (my language) too (and probably many other languages in Indian region) but we just have very slight changes in the names of the numbers.
Some slavic (Slovenian) also have 36 as šestintrideset = six and thirty
"We have weirder systems that sscience fiction has ever come up with"
There is a series of video games, that shaped pretty much the whole genre of puzzle games, called Myst
In it there is a language called the D'ni that comes from a people of the same name, and I think they're fascinating
Where Klingon is basically a 1 to 1 from english, D'ni has just nothing to do with it on every scale
On the langage side, words aren't just 1 to 1, there is a totally different grammar and syntax system
and the alphabet is actually phonetic with 35 different symbols that are a combination of 13 unique line paterns
But most interesting of all is their number system that is what I'd call a double base 5
There are 25 symbols that you would use as a standard base 25, which in itself is already pretty unique
But the 25 symbols themselves are constructed on a base 5 system :
There are 5 base symbols from 0 to 4, and (excluding 0) if you rotate them by 90°, it's like multiplying them by 5
and if you take that multiple of 5 and superimpose it with the symbols from 1 to 4, it acts as an adition
So to write 87, you first get 3 * 25 + 12, the first symbol is 3 in 25's place, and the second in the 1's place is 12, written as 2 * 5 + 2
Me: _sees Tom Scott in the thumbnail_
Also me: :O
Danish pronunciation is easy, just put a potato in your mouth. and if you happen to be drunk and there you go, Swedish.
Danish is more like drunken Swedish... :D
I find Swedish much easier than Danish! :P
i know Swedish and reading danish is like reading this - helo im frome englind end ma nam is edwerd end i liek to dreve e ker
Swedish is like drunken Swedish
The Jawns ?
Do you mean Danish is like drunken Swedish or
Great video, thanks for putting it together. It was my understanding that Klingon was base 3 until they met other species. They switch to base 10 to keep interactions easy. I think I got that from a Michael Okuda book
I think it is mentioned in The Klingon Dictionary, it was basically One, Two, Three, more than three (I even think Three and More than three were the same word)
Worth looking at numbers in Sign Languages as well. Apart from the differences between different Sign Languages (Eg British Sign Language and American Sign Language), there are regional differences within them Eg The number 6 in BSL
This is one of my favorite videos on CZcams. I am compelled to observe that if you count by the phalanges (the bones of your fingers), you can count to 12 on the fingers of one hand, using the thumb to mark your place. This would also mean that it's much easier to represent thirds and sixths in your number system without repeating duodecimals past the duodecimal point, although fifths become problematic.
It is the first video I found on numberphile as much as I watched it that signifies/talks about the concepts from India and Southeast Asia .... And I'm really proud to use the number notation system we use in hindi (because I'm really used to it )... Though I like the sanskrit counting much because it feels a lot easier than hindi as you don't have to learn that much about it...
P.S. correct me if I'm wrong at any point ...
Great video content but forget that, this is possibly Tom's best ever performance
We in Slovenia have a logic competition, where one of the four questions is in linguistics.
In 2019 (we) kids age 12-13 had to figure out what part of the body corresponds to what number like in the Papua new Guinea language.
I was just talking about this the other day! In base-12 Sumerian you count your thumb against each pad of your fingers on your left hand, so you get 12 total counted. Then right hand puts up a finger for each count of twelve, then put those fingers “away” counting the other five, taking you to 120. But you can hold up both hands and depending which fingers you’re right hand is holding up and which finger pad your left thumb is touching, you can “show” people what number you’re talking about anywhere from 1-120! So for instance 58 would be thumb index middle ring fingers up on right hand, denoting 48; while your left thumb is on the tip of your left pinky, adding the 10 more.
Pretty incredible!