Names of long numbers

[Eric Walch]

Names of big English numbers don't make any sense. We had a discussion at it at dinner the other day. Those numbers are just as logic as measures in Oolite.

The current continental European name giving is already 500 years old. There were the old names thousand, million, malliard. Instead of inventing again new names, it was proposed to use multiples of million for higher numbers:
bi-million (million x million) = billion
tri-million (million x million x million) = trillion
quatre-million (million x million x million x million) = quadrillion

And also
Milliard (thousand x million)
bi-milliard (thoussand x bi-million) = billiard
tri-milliard (thousand x tri-million) = trilliard
quatre-milliard (thousand x quatre-million) = quadrilliard

A very logic name scheme, were the prefixes make sense. See also: list of big numbers

However, for some reason English speaking people started using different names.

e.g. billion for thousand x million and trillion for million x million.

Now the big question: does any of you english speaking people knows what the meaning of "bi", "tri", "quad" in the english language means? We could not figure out how those multipliers in current english are mend and also the wiki pages give no clue about this. It always seems thousand off from a logical name.

The wiki shows a nice overview of list of large numbers but fails to answer the logic behind the english name giving and why they replaced the old names.

At least Google translate replaces "Billiard" to "Milliard" when translating numbers from english to Dutch. It fails however to correctly translate the higher names. So english numbers seem to suffer from the same mess as Oolite dimensions.

[cim]

It was still very ambiguous when I was younger whether British English "billion" was 10^9 or 10^12. The US usage of 10^9 seems to have taken over almost completely now, though. (And was popular enough in the 1980s that the original Elite used it for the planetary populations, for that matter)

Presumably the US logic is that a "llion" is three zeros, so "million" = "monollion" = "1 llion after thousand" = 10^6, "billion" = "2 llion after thousand" = 10^9, etc.

[submersible]

It was still very ambiguous ..... The US usage of ...

OT: While we're at it - what's with Aluminum, why not Helum , Osmum and my favorite Sodum.

[Gimi]

Very interesting, I didn't know that the older English terminology was equivalent to the current European one. I'm going to start using the "correct" English terms for large numbers from now on. It always annoys me how the English language is being simplified by non-native English speakers as has happened here. (How is that for throwing some petrol on to the fire)

Edit: Did a little more research, and it seems that the two systems of naming large numbers actually exist in continental Europe and elsewhere as well, and it's a matter of what has become the common system in everyday use. According to the [wp]Long and short scales[/wp] page on Wikipedia the Brits translated both systems from French.

Guess I will have to reconsider

[Eric Walch]

It was still very ambiguous when I was younger whether British English "billion" was 10^9 or 10^12.

I didn't realise the change in Britain was so recent. I started studying chemistry in 1979. So it is likely that some of my English study books used the old and other the new notation. From the Wiki I also read that the French used the short scale and only switched to the long scale around 1948.

I now took my "Oxford dictionary of current English" (edition 1955).
It says: Billion = in England and Germany 10^12, in France and the USA 10^9

While my French "Larousse" (edition 1952) writes: Billion = 10^12

For trillion the same in that Oxford dictionary. Only that they talk now about "Great Britain" instead of "England". (Inconsistent name giving because they mean the same)

So, my dictionary was already wrong for France back then and now also for English. It is an old dictionary, but I never realised that numbers would change in language.

[spara]

What annoys me the most about this, are on-line journalists that simply translate news from US-English or UK-English or whatnot-English to my language (Finnish) and don't understand this difference. It produces funny news when we are talking about the number of star systems in Milky Way or the national budget of USA etc.

The real problem in this is that there are people who read these wrongly translated news and from that moment that error just became fact in their head. And if you are a government authoritive making decisions based on these wrongly translated news, who's to blame?

Offtopic
Let's start to talk about metric vs imperial too. And why on earth we are still using that 60-base system from those ancient Babylonian days, give me radians and 10-hour clock please.
/Offtopic

[Smivs]

You'd like my ruler - it's 0.8 cubits long by one inch wide and 2mm thick

[Eric Walch]

What annoys me the most about this, are on-line journalists that simply translate news from US-English or UK-English or whatnot-English to my language (Finnish) and don't understand this difference.

Not only on-line journalists. Recently I had it in a printed technical magazine. The numbers in the article did not fit in my opinion. However, it was a good article with references, so I searched for the original source and noticed it was caused by this number translation. It was just that from a technical magazine you would expect that one of the redactors should also have noticed there strange size of numbers.

[Commander McLane]

My number one personal favourite annoying transformation between anglo-american and continental (or is it germanic only?) units is for fuel consumption. We calculate in liters per 100 kilometers, the anglophone world in miles per gallon. So it's not only two different unit pairs with odd fractional relations (liters vs gallons; kilometers vs miles), but it's also expressed the other way round. Pure madness.

[Smivs]

Ha, and here in the UK we buy petrol by the litre, and still refer to miles per gallon!

[Cody]

Ha, and here in the UK we buy petrol by the litre, and still refer to miles per gallon!

Said UK gallon being different to the US gallon, I think.

[cim]

Ha, and here in the UK we buy petrol by the litre, and still refer to miles per gallon!

Though miles are still the common unit of measurement of road distance, and I'm not sure litres per 100 miles as the unit of efficiency would catch on.

[Commander McLane]

Ha, and here in the UK we buy petrol by the litre, and still refer to miles per gallon!

Said UK gallon being different to the US gallon, I think.

… which is just the icing on the cake. (I didn't want to mention it in my rant above, which I felt was absurd enough even without having to deal with two different types of gallons. But it was meant to be included in my sentiment: ) Pure madness!

[Eric Walch]

...(or is it germanic only?) units is for fuel consumption. We calculate in liters per 100 kilometers,

I don't know how German that is. In Holland it is quite uncommon and we always calculate how much kilometres you can drive on one litre fuel. Very easy for fast calculating how many km you can drive when there is still 10 litres left.

Probably the German method is more common worldwide, as both cars I used in the past (BMW and NISSAN) had a fuel consumption computer telling me how much fuel is used in 100 km. I always had to recalculate those numbers to Dutch values before they got a meaning to me.

[Smivs]

...both cars I used in the past (BMW and NISSAN) had a fuel consumption computer telling me how much fuel is used in 100 km.

Mine (Ford) tells me current mpg and how many miles left in the tank based on current consumption. Very sensible and very useful.