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jazzyb | 8 years ago

I don't understand how the author is judging complexity. The top one, Huli, is a base-15 number system but looks quite regular otherwise. French, on the other hand, switches from a base-10 to a base-20 at 80 and then switches things up at 97.

According to the listing, Welsh sits somewhere between these two but it has separate numbering systems for {20s, 40s, 60s, 80s}, {30s, 70s, 90s}, and {50s}. That seems much more complicated than either Huli or French.

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panglott|8 years ago

Putting Japanese at such a low complexity shows a lot about the author's criteria and bias.

Japanese numerals are quite easy, but when it comes to actually counting things, it is quite complex. There are two series of numeral words that are used in different contexts, as well as dozens of counter words that pair with a variety of semantic categories. Many combinations or number + noun have quite irregular combinations, like "hatachi" (20 years of age) or "hatsuka" (20th day of the month).

osdiab|8 years ago

Yeah, I was definitely thinking that Japanese counting is way more complex than Chinese counting.

Jtsummers|8 years ago

Huli seems to change (though using a common root?) the words for the small numbers (like 1, 2, 3) when they get applied to how many 15s have been counted. "one fifteen" is "nguira ni", where does "ni" come from? "two fifteen" is "ngui ki", "ki" from "kira", why'd "nguira" abbreviated?

It's regular in construction, but the words change and drop parts of the basic number without a particular pattern (as an outsider to the language). "kira" -> "ki" makes sense. "duria" -> "dauni" -> "dau" kind of makes sense, but adds an extra letter (how does the sound actually change?). "tebira" -> "tebone" -> "tebo". A pattern is forming. Drop the "r-" and replace it with an "n-" (except for some) and later drop the "n-".

gkya|8 years ago

In french it's base ten only. AFAIK it's just the names, particularly in France, that are a bit confusing. I don't think francophones think of quatre-vingts as 20 20 20 20, but as 80. Just like english is not base-12 because its eleven and twelve, and not oneteen and twoteen.

andreareina|8 years ago

Just the names doesn't account for 80 + 10, 80 + 11, ..., 80 + 19.

Robin_Message|8 years ago

Also, Swiss French, which has proper words for seventy and ninety, is considered more complex than French French, even though I'd consider having specific words simpler (especially given the complexity of 97 (which is said as 4 x 20 + 10 + 7)

stromgo|8 years ago

Did you interpret the table backwards? Swiss French is considered simpler:

  1. (most complex)
  19. French
  33. Swiss French
  69. (simplest)

oblio|8 years ago

67 isn't much better, either. It's 60 + 10 + 7.

nextstep|8 years ago

I think it’s implied that base-10 is lowest complexity (this page is for English speakers) and I think that is why base-15 is more “complex” than the weird French system which is mostly addition of base-10 primitives.

yorwba|8 years ago

Huli appears regular, but a construction like "ngui ki, ngui tebone-gonaga tebira" to mean "fifteen twos and the three of the third fifteen" does seem like quite a mouthful for 33.

jstanley|8 years ago

It's not "fifteen twos" but "two fifteens".

They're just counting how many fifteens they've got: "two complete fifteens, and 3 from the third fifteen"

abhishekjha|8 years ago

Is the complexity based on pronunciation here?

dingo_bat|8 years ago

Agreed. Hindi is ranked 4th most difficult but the system is identical to English (rank 41). Just the symbols for the digits are different. Even they are similar looking!

Manishearth|8 years ago

Hindi/Marathi are not easy, you almost have to memorize the numbers 1-100.

Hindi and Marathi both have dedicated names for the tens (11, 12, 13, ...) and after that numbers are named in the reverse order of their digits. E.g. 45 will be five - forty.

_except_ the word for five will be different from the word for five in, say, 75. Similarly, the word for "fifty" in the fifties is different for many of them.

There's a lot of variation which you basically don't realize if you speak these languages natively, the variation can't be boxed into "rules" to make it easy to learn, and the end result is that you just end up implicitly memorizing it.

It's hard to realize because you basically end up modeling this subconsciously as there being multiple ways to say "five" and multiple ways to say "seventy", so the numbers seem to be following a fixed scheme, but in reality you've learned which synonym to use where.

In fact when folks talk about french numbers being weird and complex, this is often the counterexample I give.

I suspect this complexity arose from having synonyms for numbers which eventually randomly settled down, and also from having sandhi (rules for melding words together) which got corrupted over time, leading to things like "tay/ees" vs "chau/bees"

The website probably should have used the "different form"/"different word" thing it did for English. But note that the site did consider "twelve" to be its own number, not 10 + 2, which is basically what's happening here too, just extended 1-100.

nileshtrivedi|8 years ago

Not at all. As an example, consider how 55 and 57 are pronounced. "PachPAN"and "SattaVAN". The components have changed arbitrarily for no reason. 70 is "Sattar" but 71 becomes "IkHattar". 2 is "Do", but 12,22,32 use "Ba" as the prefix. Plenty more cases like this.

Compare this to "Fifty five" and "Fifty seven".

kra3|8 years ago

That, is the problem with transliterating into English. Otherwise it is quite staight forward (even the pronunciation). Also, language's ability to conjugate words has to be considered. Languages branching from sanskrit,

jgh|8 years ago

yeah came here to say this. Huli seems to be pretty much the same as english except base-15 instead of base-10. It even has the special case of the second 10 or 15 being different in form from the rest of the numbers.

edit: actually it seems like the Huli system is more uniform than English. It doesn't switch up the word order after 15. So it's "15 and 1 ..." whereas english goes "3 and 10.." and then "2x10 and 1..."

DonaldFisk|8 years ago

French spoken in Belgium and Switzerland has 70 = septante and 90 = nonante. In parts of Switzerland, 80 = huitante.