58 and other Confusing Numbers

May 2, 2020 12:33 PM

"The number of ways that humans use numbers .. .doesn't even make sense"
posted by dhruva (43 comments total)

That's not numbers. That's the trappings and decorations around numbers. The numbers are still universal.
posted by darksasami at 1:19 PM on May 2, 2020 [4 favorites]

Tom missed one subtlety with the body-part tally systems, if I recall correctly; some such systems are gendered, with men and women using different bases because of having different numbers of identifiable body features. I don't think I'm just making that up.
posted by flabdablet at 1:39 PM on May 2, 2020

That's not numbers. That's the trappings and decorations around numbers. The numbers are still universal.

The word "number" in English is used to denote both the word (or representation) and the underlying concept. This video, by a linguist and discussing words used in different contexts and in different languages, is using "number" in the former sense.

I wish the internet would have less in your face headlines and links, but also that responses would apply the principle of charity rather than choose the least sensible interpretation in order to offer up a glib dismissal.
posted by mark k at 2:16 PM on May 2, 2020 [35 favorites]

Octal (base 8) and Hexadecimal (base 16) are both incredibly useful and have been used for clever bits of useful mnemonics, a handy easy to remember number: 3735928559 (base 10) is used as an error indicator on certain equipment, filling the four bytes with the hex DEADBEEF. I'm quite liking 3503344330.
posted by sammyo at 2:43 PM on May 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

I keep rewinding to 1:58 because, wow, wtf, Denmark?
posted by runehog at 3:19 PM on May 2, 2020 [4 favorites]

A tumblr classic starts:
French: …Sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, sixty-ten…
Other languages: **stares**
French: **stares back**
French: …sixty-eleven, sixty-twelve, sixty-thirteen…
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 3:57 PM on May 2, 2020 [24 favorites]

D0D0CACA
posted by Obscure Reference at 4:48 PM on May 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

A tumblr classic starts:

Interestingly, I think that's a French French thing — Swiss French and Flemish French don't do that. In those variants, 70, 80, and 90 are their own numbers/prefixes: septante, huitante and nonante.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:11 PM on May 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

Also, the French would say sixty and eleven--soixante et onze.
posted by obscure simpsons reference at 5:14 PM on May 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Nonante is definitely more intuitive for speakers of Germanic languages than quatre-vingt-dix (twenty-four-ten).
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:16 PM on May 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

That's not numbers.

Notice how the video is about the "WAYS that humans USE numbers"
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:03 PM on May 2, 2020

French: …Sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, sixty-ten…
Other languages: **stares**

Abraham Lincoln, unfazed: "Four score and seven years ago..."
posted by straight at 6:03 PM on May 2, 2020 [4 favorites]

If in French the word for 80 translates directly as "four twenties," does that mean that French stoners get high at 80 o'clock?
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:06 PM on May 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

yes, exactly
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:07 PM on May 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Sure, the words we use for numbers varies, but if a race of aliens arrived on Earth you can feel pretty certain that they understand the relation between circumference and diameter.

That said, learning a foreign language can be frustrating. Whenever I try to remember what the French word for 97 is I have to do math.
posted by Dumsnill at 8:37 PM on May 2, 2020

One thing from Dutch is that instead of, say, twenty-five, they say five and twenty. The higher numbers keep the same order though so 425 for example is 'four hundred five and twenty.'

I would have also added base 60, from the Sumerians and still used today for time and geographic coordinates.

In Japanese of course there's not just a quantity but a counter so that you have to know what type of object is being counted. Is it long and thin? Is it a big or small animal? Really.

Also the statement "numbers are universal" doesn't add much information to this conversation. What is universal? Integers? Negative numbers? Zero? Reals? Irrational numbers? Infinity? Questions about what exists and what is the outcome of our chosen formal systems are not trivial questions. Even PI needs to be defined carefully otherwise you already have a barrier in discussions with non-Euclidean aliens.
posted by vacapinta at 2:19 AM on May 3, 2020 [6 favorites]

Numbers are universal in a relational sense. Ratios will be the same in all systems.
posted by Dumsnill at 2:31 AM on May 3, 2020

Ratios will be the same in all systems

My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
posted by flabdablet at 2:36 AM on May 3, 2020 [5 favorites]

Pi is what it is. There is no discussion to be had with aliens, Euclidian or otherwise.
posted by Dumsnill at 2:53 AM on May 3, 2020

Pi is what it is.

Not if your language system doesn’t have a word for it and your mathematics doesn’t make use of it. I mean, it’s there, like hydrogen and oxygen make up “water,” but we’ve had more years of words for water that were ignorant of this than we’ve had years that aren’t by... well, orders of magnitude. That doesn’t mean the discussions of water were meaningless for 10s of 1000s of years.

Also, your whole approach to this is so off point with the video under discussion that it’s not even wrong, it’s irrelevant. The video is about how different human languages indicate and, to a lesser degree, manipulate numbers for every day counting purposes. I have a great fondness for the frequent East Asian use of 10,000 for “a lot” and lakh and crore are in their own league....

So, I get the hill you're trying to die on here, but you’re fighting the wrong war, so... maybe WTFA and come back if you still want to comment?

In a slightly related thing, I read a math textbook years ago where each chapter was a different mathematics system from around the globe (mostly ancient, too), and each chapter ended with problems to solve using that system. I cannot remember the name of the book, however, and would love to reread it. Anybody know what I’m talking about?
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:29 AM on May 3, 2020 [5 favorites]

Phhhtt, Pi is just Tau/2... long live Tau. And he didn't even go US vs UK 'billion' (you people are wrong). You want alien numbers.... try The Universe of Discourse : A message to the aliens (introduction).
posted by zengargoyle at 4:19 AM on May 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

In Japanese of course there's not just a quantity but a counter so that you have to know what type of object is being counted. Is it long and thin? Is it a big or small animal? Really.

This isn’t entirely unique to Chinese (and, consequently, Japanese). Step in to your local bakery and ask for “three breads, please!” and see how far you get without counters in English ; )
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:27 AM on May 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

I did watch the video before commentig and it's about language not mathematics, which is what I've been saying. Some commenters seem to think otherwise. If I died on that hill, fine. Life is finite and the hills are alive with the sound of music.
posted by Dumsnill at 4:40 AM on May 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

obscure simpsons reference: "Also, the French would say sixty and eleven--soixante et onze."

Ooh laa laa!
posted by chavenet at 4:56 AM on May 3, 2020

Step in to your local bakery and ask for “three breads, please!” and see how far you get without counters in English ; )

Not sure this is a great example because most bakeries have more than one product. In a relatively simple bakery, you might be able to get away with “two ryes, please.” In most cases you have to specify with rolls, loaves, baguettes, etc. The closest thing English has to counters in Japanese is the weird world of collective nouns. Why do keys and sheep come in flocks, while cows come in herds? We still do use heads of cattle, but only in very specific circumstances.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:18 AM on May 3, 2020

Genji, those are called mass nouns and there was an awesome askme thread about them here a while back.

Also I'm with Dumsnill on this. The video is not at all about how people *use* numbers. It's about how we communicate them. Imo an important distinction.
posted by dbx at 6:51 AM on May 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

GenjiandProust: "you might be able to get away with “two ryes, please.”"

At Dexys Midnight Bakery that'd be "two ryes, aye"
posted by chavenet at 7:02 AM on May 3, 2020 [4 favorites]

Not if your language system doesn’t have a word for it and your mathematics doesn’t make use of it.

If your languague doesn't have a name for it your thought world has no concept for it. Why is that hard to understand?
posted by Dumsnill at 7:05 AM on May 3, 2020

The difference in place separators for lakh and crore was a new one for me, and now I can't get past the idea that a uniform two-digit separator makes more sense than three. After turning it over in my head for a while (during a shower) I realized it's because I want square roots to work nicely, but 1,000 does not have a whole number square root.

Know what it does have, though? A whole number cube root. In other words, a place system with 3 digits per block is suited to talking about volumes, while one with 2 per block is suited to talking about areas.

This suggests why 4 digits doesn't seem to happen -- and makes me want to write a story about aliens who are commonly measuring volume-through-time, and would thus use such a system.
posted by dbx at 7:15 AM on May 3, 2020 [8 favorites]

Oh my goodness -- the notation is not ambiguous. The numbers remain the same wherever we put the commas, so... from now on when I'm talking about areas (I teach math, so more often than most people) I'm going to consider groupings of 2 rather than 3. We'll see how it goes over! I already use tau/2 in place of pi from time to time, so I'm well positioned to be on the front lines of this one.

This post has been a revelation for me, and hopefully a revolution for the world of numerical communication! Thanks for posting it 😆
posted by dbx at 8:46 AM on May 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.

At a speed of a few attoparsec per microfortnight, right?
posted by DreamerFi at 12:23 PM on May 3, 2020

If your languague doesn't have a name for it your thought world has no concept for it. Why is that hard to understand?

Because it's not true? I mean the concept is generally going to precede the word.
posted by mark k at 1:29 PM on May 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

Oh COME ON, Hindi does not have one hundred different words for the first hundred numbers. It's exactly like counting in english, ffs, with only two slight variations, viz.,

(a) 19 in english is derived from nine-and-ten but in hindi the word for 19 derives from one-less-than-twenty. It works the same for 29, 39, 49, etc. so it's a consistent pattern so this doesn't count as any new words.

(b) However, the word for, say, 50, doesn't carry straight on into the words for 51, 52, 53, etc. in the exact form like it does in english. Sometimes it's a modified form that carries on and sometimes it's just a whole new sound. It's like if the word for 50 in English was "pentadeca", but then 51 was still fifty-one and 52 was still fifty-two etc. So at best there's one "new word" for every ten numbers in the first 100.

Other than this it's no different from english numbers. There are certainly not one hundred different words for one hundred numbers.

It's making me irrationally angry that this guy told such a whopping bare-faced lie. He heard some exotic-sounding "face" about an exotic race of people and boom, there ya go. Just the sheer gee-whiz believe-it-or-not energy he's got going on without, apparently, any fact checking whatsoever, was already enough to make me leery of the video. But a minute in he tells this ridiculous lie? GTFO.
posted by MiraK at 1:54 PM on May 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

Dumsnill and Mark K, I think your confidence on this point may be misplaced. I think there's a pretty lively debate about that exact question, viz: Can we think without language?

Interestingly enough, that link talks about how having words for numbers changes our facility with counting!
posted by dbx at 2:39 PM on May 3, 2020

If your languague doesn't have a name for it your thought world has no concept for it.

We have plenty of concepts that don't have individual labels. (See: All those articles about "untranslateable words" that actually mean "there's no one-to-one equivalent word or short phrase that means this other word"; they're generally very easily translateable to a longer phrase.)

We even have concepts that don't have short phrases or translated definitions at all, including (easy one) new inventions that don't yet have a name, and (more complex) things like "roughly, the difficulty of making decisions at meetings between peers who have a shared set of goals but no established process for meeting those goals or even established processes for holding meetings," which every startup and new activist org has run into. (And no, that's not a definition in search of a word, because if you asked a dozen people to define that general concept, there'd be enough difference in focus that you wouldn't be able to find a single word that encompassed them.)

If you don't have a name/label for it, it's harder to discuss and much harder to problem-solve around, but that doesn't mean the concept doesn't exist. It's just messy.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 6:45 PM on May 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

The Tongan body tally reminded me of the binary finger tally, which I always remember and use not quite enough that I internalise it.

If you’ve not met it before, have a look at this!
posted by fizban at 3:11 AM on May 4, 2020

MiraK:The Wikibooks page on Hindi numbers lists the names of all the numbers from 1 to 100. When I attempted to teach myself a little Urdu in 2003, the numbers from 1 to 100 were listed in the same way in the back of the book. While visiting South Asia, I successfully avoided talking about any quantities larger than twelve with anyone who didn't speak English. The struggle is real.

Tom Scott acknowledges in passing that there are patterns in these number names – that's obvious when you look at the list – but there are so many exceptions, and every group of ten has its own exceptions, and those exceptions don't consistently apply to numbers with the same ones digit, that a language learner is essentially reduced to memorizing every number individually because it's easier than keeping track of all the rules and exceptions. If you have a relatively simple and easy way to explain how to express the name of each number from, say, 20 to 100 in Hindi – let's say, simple enough to fit on an index card, and easier than memorizing 80 number names – please share it, because I would love to know how to say all these numbers without having to climb that particular hill.
posted by skoosh at 12:38 PM on May 4, 2020

> If your languague doesn't have a name for it your thought world has no concept for it.

Interesting concept. Do you have a word for it? :P

We have words for concepts that we need to talk about frequently enough to make it worth having a word for them. For others we use phrases and coin new words when that becomes cumbersome. As Pinker observes, you can want to express an idea and be unable to find the word(s) for it ("it's on the tip of my tongue" - happens to me all too often of late :/ ).

Anyway. This video seems to be about language, not maths (or arithmetic). Or the intersection of those things. A rich and fascinating vein for sure. Here's a great story about that sort of thing that was of particular interest to me at one point: https://metacpan.org/pod/Locale::Maketext::TPJ13#A-Localization-Horror-Story:-It-Could-Happen-To-You

I liked the bit in about hand gestures in the video. Reminded me of when I was young & naive on holiday in Czechia. Made the usual attempt to learn a few words of the local language but the word for "two" was completely unpronounceable by me so when ordering two beers I would hold up two fingers (like a peace sign) but still somehow always got three. I eventually realised that the locals indicate small numbers starting from the thumb so they were seeing the middle finger as the third finger and understanding "three". That realisation and its ramifications were, in retrospect, obviously very important in a lot of my life thereafter. As was Czech beer :)
posted by merlynkline at 2:13 PM on May 4, 2020

skoosh, I understand that you, as someone who does not speak the language, find it difficult to notice and understand the (totally straightforward, FYI) rules governing the formation of hindi/urdu numbers. But it's serious bullshit for you or this writer to say "whelp, they LOOK like all different words to me, therefore they ARE all different words."

The rules are:

(1) You count by saying one-twenty rather than twenty-one. The order one ones and tens is switched around compared to english, is all. As you look through the twenties number list, look at the suffix. They all end in "--is". The thirties all end in "--tis". The forties all end in "--alis." The fifties all end in "-pan." The sixties all end in "--sath". The seventies are "--attar". The eighties are "--assi." The nineties are "--anbe".

(2) Every 9th digit except for the numbers 9 and 99 take on the suffix of the next decade and use the prefix "un" which means "one before" or "one less than".

(3) The first part of the numbers are the ones. You'll always see "ik" for 1, "ba" for 2. "tre" or "tir" for 3, "chau" for 4, etc. These prefixes combine with suffixes using standard rules governing all morphemes (word boundaries) in Hindi/Urdu. Morphophonology != NEW words. For example, you do not consider plural nouns or verbs of various tenses in english to be whole new words. Similarly here.
posted by MiraK at 8:16 AM on May 6, 2020

the binary finger tally

is old hat. All the cool kids count in five-bit Gray code. That way, going from each number to the next involves moving only one finger; much less awkward.
posted by flabdablet at 11:16 AM on May 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

Ha, the Gray code was the CS way of solving a recent Matt Parker's Maths Puzzles problem.

But the cool kids just count using the pads of their fingers. Each finger has 4, one in the palm and three on the digit. Keeps you from spraining your hand trying to stick up that finger between your pinkie and ring finger.
posted by zengargoyle at 8:02 PM on May 6, 2020

Keeps you from spraining your hand trying to stick up that finger between your pinkie and ring finger.

I hate to tell you this, Count Rugen, but most of us don't have a finger between the pinkie and ring finger.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:02 PM on May 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

If we did, we could count 1 to 64 on one hand and 65 to 4160 on two!

(0 takes no hands at all)
posted by flabdablet at 5:03 PM on May 7, 2020