The Land Between Numbers and Letters
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- Опубликовано: 10 фев 2025
- Let me show you a bunch of cool patterns within the words we use for numbers in English, and some surprising traits that show up when numbers are given names in a language!
Next episode (coming out on March 12th) is the 2nd last episode of Grade -1, and will be my unique version of a "final exam" (it will be a fun video even for people who hate tests). If anybody wants to "study" for the exam, you can rewatch older episodes on this channel (most of the questions will require a mix of some knowledge from one of my episodes and some problem-solving and/or basic arithmetic from you). After that, later in March, will be the Grade -1 finale, which will be like a documentary about making this crazy grade and transitioning to Grade -2.
During March I will be livestreaming on my @Domotro channel every Monday at 10 AM Pacific Time, and every Thursday (except March 2nd) at 6 PM Pacific Time, so stop by some of those if you want to see some fun random activities and/or ask me anything in the chat. (They also will be timestamped with chapters afterwards for people who can't watch them live).
Check out my Patreon at / comboclass if you want to support the channel, get some cool bonus content, and get your name on a whiteboard in the Grade -1 finale! Thanks to all of my supporters there:
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[Some topics mentioned in this episode include: words for numbers, the English language, the long scale vs. short scale for numbers like one million and one billion, a number naming system invented by John Conway and Richard Guy and written about in the book "The Book of Numbers", what's special about four, what's special about eight and zero, what's special about one and forty, rare number words that have all their letters in alphabetical order, what happens if we alphabetize all of the numbers compared to each other, and other crazy things in the land between language and math]
DISCLAIMER: never try to copy any physical actions you see in Combo Class, such as anything involving fire, tools, science experiments, or falling clocks.
Next episode (on March 12th) will be the 2nd last episode of Grade -1, and will be my unique version of a "final exam" (it will be a fun video even for people who hate tests). If anybody wants to "study" for the exam, you can rewatch older episodes on this channel. After that, later in March, will be a long Grade -1 finale... Also check the description for details about my new streaming schedule on my @Domotro channel
This is all GRADE 1???Shiiiiiii...
@@ohmisterjeff Nah bro it's grade -1
@@CubeCatSittingOnWater You're right! Which way are we going? 😆 (and my sentiment did not change a bit)
Don't quit :((((((
What will happen after that?
Grade 0?
Malay speaker here!
Alright to start off, let’s just list 0 and the first 10 numbers in Malay
Sifar
Satu
Dua
Tiga
Empat
Lima
Enam
Tujuh
Lapan
Sembilan
Sepuluh
If look carefully, you’ll notice that there is no numbers that is spelt with the same number of letters as it is trying to represent. If we played the letter number chain game, we get loop of 5 to 4, but just like English, all other number will eventually get to 4.
Interesting! A mini loop at a similar spot to English’s fixed point (four)
Dua 3
Tiga 4
Empat 5
Sifar 0 messed it up methinks
In German it is
Null
Eins
Zwei
Drei
Vier
Fünf
Sechs
Sieben
Acht
Neun
Zehn
As you can see most numbers from 0-10 have 4 letters in them. And since Sieben has six letters and Sechs has 5 letters, those would fall down to Fünf, which has four letters. And Vier has four letters.
turkish it is like this
sıfır
bir
iki
üç
dört
beş
altı
yedi
sekiz
dokuz
on
onbir
if it is 5 letters it goes to 3-2 loop (others except 3-2 since they are in loop) stuck on 4 also 0 seems similar to malay. 4 has 4 letters interesting why 4 is like that
Here in The Netherlands we use the long scale, but instead of saying "a thousand [...]", we replace -on with -ard, so (translated):
Million
Milliard
Billion
Billiard
Trillion
Trilliard
etc.
This makes it kind of confusing at times to switch from using the long scale in Dutch to the short scale in English, just like how we use the decimal comma instead of decimal point.
It would be much more convenient if all languages used the same number conventions.
Polish:
0: zero
1: jeden
2: dwa
3: trzy
4: cztery
5: pięć
6: sześć
7: siedem
8: osiem
9: dziewięć
The sequence of looking at the number of letters always end up in a three-loop of 6-5-4
Cool!
J and k first appear in the quaternions, which ironically have no order. In German, ß (ss after short vowels or diphtongs) appears first in dreißig 30, but not in Switzerland. In Switzerland they learn Standard German (coll. "Hochdeutsch") in writing, but they abolished the ß for ss in the late 1990ies. The first German number alphabetically is acht 8.
Also, 4 in German vier has 4 letters, and 7 has always annoyed me with its many syllables.
SIEBEN!!!
In Norwegian, the chain of numbers always ends up at 2 (to), 3 (tre) or 4 (fire).
In Finnish, the numbers up to 6 end up at 5 (viisi), but anything higher than that ends up in a loop between 8 (kahdeksan) and 9 (yhdeksän). The higher numbers can be quite long (the word for 17 has 15 letters, and the word for 27 has 22... Close but no banana)
Thanks for sharing!
"I'm just lying a little bit [from the "Fibonacci= Pythagoras" video]... close, but no banana. Ohhhkay, fan-tas-tic!" That's who I thought of when you said "close but no banana."
"[..] but anything higher than [six] ends up in a loop between 8 (kahdeksan) and 9 (yhdeksän)."
There are two exceptions: 100, "sata", and 1000, "tuhat". Those end up at 5.
In Finnish we never say "one hundred" or "one thousand", it's always "(a) hundred" or "(a) thousand". (We also don't use articles with nouns. But we use a ton of inflection suffixes to counter. :) )
@@synchronos1 thanks for the correction!
The Finnish kaksi (2) translates to “How are you?”(Как си?) in Bulgarian 😊
“No numbers have a J or a K”
Quaternions: “am I a joke to you?”
You’re very inspiring in the art of educating with charisma!
in Greek it's the number 5 (πέντε) that has the same number of letters as its cardinality. it's also the one with this property. the number 4 (τέσσερα) also has a disproportionately large number of letters compared to other numbers of its range. after the number 12 the amount of letters im numbers' names grows significantly since it's an additive system (13 is pronounced 10,3 - δεκατρία)
In french we have a cycle
3 (trois) -> 5 (cinq) -> 4 (quatre) -> 6 (six) -> 3
In Dutch it's exactly like English where 4 (vier) -> 4 is the only cycle
That cycle is strangely pleasing
From now on, I shall refer to 11 as Elodd, and 7 as sodd.
I think I would legitimately prefer if those were the names for those numbers. Imagine calling a 7-11 store "Sodd Elodd" lmao. That has me chuckling.
I Love These Vids Demotro!!! this your boy Dean in Sacramentoooooo -keep it up, hope you making money off these!
Very cool. My first introduction to bridging the gap between language and math was Godel Escer Bach. There's always something very satisfying about pacing out all these areas of inquiry.
Jk being empty while he talks about "all letters having a number that they show up at" got me XDDD
Thank you for expressing a repressed frustration I had about number nomenclature.
Any John Conway book is something everyone should read.
Negative Fifteen has 15 letters, which counts if you ignore the negative
Yeah but it doesn’t have Negative 15 letters haha, so it would go to positive 15 which would end up at 4
A zillion in German is the rarely used abertausend ("but thousand"), which is funny for the a and z connection in the word order 😂
In Indonesia we have this:
Satu 1
Dua 2
Tiga 3
Empat 4
Lima 5
Enam 6
Tujuh 7
Delapan 8
Sembilan 9
you might have already seen something here, the first letter of each number makes a cool pattern. 1 & 9 starts with S, 2 & 8 starts with D, 3&7 starts with T, 4&6 starts with E, but only 5 that doesnt have a partner😅
Lapan or delapan for 8?
Since there are an odd number of integers from 1 to 9, not all of them can have a partner different from themselves. the map 1 ↦ 9, 9 ↦ 1, 2 ↦ 8, 8 ↦ 2 , 3 ↦ 7, 7 ↦ 3, 4 ↦ 6, 6 ↦ 4, 5 ↦ 5 is the map x ↦ 10−x, and since 5 is a fixed point of this map you can say that 5 partners with itself
About (2 & 8) and (3 & 7) for the (cube ) of those numbers "flip"➡️
(3 cubed) ends in 7 and so on.
In spanish the first ten numbers (0-9) are
Zero
Uno
Dos
Tres
Quatro
Cinco
Seis
Siete
Ocho
Nueve
In spanish zero is also our only number with the letter z
Interestingly there are two loops, one goes 5 5 5 5 and the other one goes 4 6 4 6
Also here in Spain it's most common to use the long scale
isn't cero spelled with a c and cuatro also with a c? (also a spanish speaker)
@@zirzeus2645 i confused cero with the catalán zero
This channel is so underrated! You deserve way more subs!
In Portuguese (at least Brazilian Portuguese), recursive number spelling of letter count leads to two repeating cycles: either 6 and 4 ("seis" e "quatro", as "seis" has "quatro", 4 letters, while "quatro" has "seis", 6 letters), or 5 (as "cinco", five, has five letters). Edit: this Portuguese trivia was already mentioned at the comments.
I love french because the french word for four: Quatre works as either 1 or 2 sylables either "cat" or "cat-re" then it goes back to purly 1 syllable until fourteen "quatorze" then back to one syllable untill seventeen "dix-sept" and stays at 2 syllables untill twenty where it goes back to 1 syllable for a number vingt then 21 is fun because it's 3 syllables for a number, same with 31, 51 and 61 with 41 being a 4 syllable outlier, then 70 is fun being litterally trasnlated as sixty-and-eleven, then eighty is fun being directly translated as four twenties, and then ninety-one is really fun being, depending on how you pronounce quatre a 3-5 syllable number as it translates as EITHER "four twenties and eleven" OR "four twenties eleven"
why? just why?, at least it's more obvious in some places that numbers past ten just mean ten plus x or times x with seventeen eightteen and nineteen being: tenseven, teneight, and tennine. and then everything I mentioned before like 80 being "4 20", and 90 being "4 20 and 10" then 97 is "4 20 10 7" followed by "4 20 10 8" and "4 20 10 9" all before going back to one syllable for one hundred, so a drop from 5 syllables to one syllable.
I think french also uses the long scale so you get wonderfull words like litterally "nine-hundred-four-twenty-ten-seven-thousand-two-hundred-sixty-eleven-million"
8:00 That's a fun game indeed! I have looked into it a couple of years ago, and tried to play it in different languages. English is boring because it has only one fixed point that loops back on itself (4 -> 4). Some other languages have much more intricate setups. Below are a few interesting results.
French has a 4-cycle: 3 -> 5 -> 4 -> 6 -> 3 (trois -> cinq -> quatre -> six -> trois)
Among European languages, the most interesting I found is Romansh (Vallander), spoken in parts of Switzerland. It has a 6-cylce: 3 -> 5 -> 8 -> 2 -> 4 -> 7 -> 3 (trais -> tschinch -> ot -> duos -> quatter -> set -> trais)
Koasati, a native american language, has a 7-cycle: 8 -> 12 -> 16 -> 19 -> 20 -> 9 -> 10 -> 8 (ontotchiinan -> pokkolawahtoklon -> pokkolawahhannaalin -> pokkolawahchakkaalin -> poltoklon -> chakkaalin -> pokkolin -> ontotchiinan)
I have checked number words in well over a thousand languages, and none of them has a longer cycle than that.
I invented my own system of counting which I use whenever I need to count. Each digit has a name with only one consonant and one vowel. The vowel can be placed either before or after, or flanking, the consonant. There are only two vowels, either pronounced , or pronounced . For every number name that features an there is one that features an . Six is , for instance, and seven is . You can let the vowel flank the consonant, so that becomes , . This is optional. Here are the numbers from one to ten: 1 nu; 2 du; 3 ti; 4 pu; 5 pi; 6 si; 7 su; 8 cu; 9 ni; 10 di. Eleven is dinu, that is ten+one; twelve didu etc. Twenty is dudi two tens. Dudi-du is twenty-two. Thirty is tidi etc. One hundred is expressed as nuki, pronounced , two hundred duki etc. is a single , pronounced as in ; so, one hundred & eight would be expressed as: nuki acu, or nuki azudi-cu. Zu is zero. This is pronounced Zoo. A thousand could be , as a reciprocal with , three, or it can be expressed as , ten hundred. A Zee, , is one ten-thousand. Nuzi dipu-ki apidi-pu is 11 thousand four hundred & fifty-four. Have fun.
Very interesting and quite a neat little design!
In spanish, the one with the number of letters in each number has two possible ends, 4 and 6 in a loop (cuatro and seis) or 5 by itself (cinco), most numbers i think they would go to the 4 and 6 loop.
Update: I've been trying this out with a number of European languages. The most interesting one I've found is Albanian, which has endpoints at 2 and 3, loops between 4/5, 6/7 and 11/12 (!), plus two more endpoints at 14 and 16 (gjashtëmbëdhjetë). The highest I've encountered.
That’s cool! :)
@@ComboClass Among European languages, the most interesting I found is Romansh (Vallander), spoken in parts of Switzerland. It has a 6-cylce: 3 -> 5 -> 8 -> 2 -> 4 -> 7 -> 3 (trais -> tschinch -> ot -> duos -> quatter -> set -> trais)
Koasati, a native american language, has a 7-cycle: 8 -> 12 -> 16 -> 19 -> 20 -> 9 -> 10 -> 8 (ontotchiinan -> pokkolawahtoklon -> pokkolawahhannaalin -> pokkolawahchakkaalin -> poltoklon -> chakkaalin -> pokkolin -> ontotchiinan)
I have checked well over a thousand languages, and none has a longer cycle than that.
6:32 love the kitty whirring in the background!
Why can I easily imagine Domotro approaching you in the street and rambling to about maths like a crazy homeless person? And why can I imagine enjoying it?
Domotro's beef with "seven" and "eleven" over having too many syllables and containing the word "even" despite being odd is a beef I also keep, occasionally blind-siding strangers with it when the opportunity arises.
I'd expect Eighteen and Eighty to come before Eight Billion. This class has really got me thinking 😁
It depends on whether a space has any alphabetical value (which is debatable in itself), but if it does have a value, should it come before A or maybe even after Z?
Also, if you're counting the number of letters, you need to decide whether the space counts as a letter at all!
If anything, 80 to 89 would be the last of the infinite numbers starting with 8, because they all start with "eight" and then "y", which is the penultimate letter of the alphabet.
@@JakubS except 81000 would come at some point before 86. The "suffixes" keep adding tons of numbers to the list.
In ASCII lexicographic ordering (used by computers), space comes before A
Let's simplify a bit and spell eight as E, eighteen as ET and eight billion as EB.
Then order them alphabetically, they become:
E
EB
ET
Do you see it now?
My contribution to number theory: a divisibility test for 2. If the number name has no e's, it is divisible. If it does, well, you're out of luck.
What is your cats name?! And another incredible installment, cant wait for the final exam!
The fluffy one is Dandelion (because he's a dandy lion and as fluffy as a dandelion), and I also have his brother Sage (who is a texture closer to a sage plant and is as wise as a sage), and now there's a 3rd one in the mix since I adopted a local stray / feral cat (who might be related to them but I'm not sure) who I named Sassafras and who has become a nice member of the trio
@@ComboClass sassafras is such a good kitty name! ~
Mary Tyler Moore would like to have her hat back.
This alphabetical order of numbers actually a great way to show how cardinal numbers make sense, how something can go after infinity.
Small correction, you don't *always* end up back at four. There are some loops which go back and forth between two numbers, because of the larger syllable numbers. Also, even before those loops were discovered, it was still an open question whether every number came back to four.
In french, I think the earliest number in alphabetical order would be five, or "Cinq" in french, and the last would be "zero", or "zéro" in french.
Now Seven and eleven shall be called sodd and elodd
5:50 oh that reminds me of this hilarious tumblr post of that and everyone was responding with not understanding how numbers work
In Hebrew:
0 - אפס (efes)
1 - אחד (echad)
2 - שניים (shnayim)
3 - שלוש (shalosh)
4 - ארבע (arba)
5 - חמש (chamesh)
6 - שש (shesh)
7 - שבע (sheva)
8 - שמונה (shmonah)
9 - תשע (tesha)
10 - עשר (eser)
There are actually a lot of letter in the Hebrew alphabet that don't show up in the names of numbers - including ג (unless you count גוגל - googol), ז, כ, and צ. That's 4 out of only 22 letters!
If you start at 1 instead of 0, the letter פ doesn't show up until אלף (elef) - one thousand, and ס doesn't show up until סקסטיליון - sextillion.
Also, because Hebrew is a heavily gendered language, all adjectives including numbers have masculine and feminine forms. The masculine forms of 1 and 2 are considered "default" (like most words in Hebrew, but not the other numbers which are feminine for some reason 🤷), but if the feminine forms are considered instead, the letter ד would not appear until מיליארד - milliard (Israel uses the long scale. On the short scale, it wouldn't appear until קוודריליון - quadrillion!)
Interesting!
In Japanese, the words for numbers are as follows (ordered kanji/hiragana/Arabic numeral):
Some clarification though; like in English, there are cases where the same number can be pronounced differently (like how 12 can be pronounced “twelve” or “dozen”). The spellings I’m using here are the ones you’ll see most often when expressing standard quantities like amounts, page numbers, years, etc.. It’s a whole rabbit hole of specifics (and don’t even get me STARTED on counters, hoo boy)
Also, this list will only consider positive integers, for simplicity’s sake.
Anyways…
For your basic numbers, it’s like this:
一/いち/1
二/に/2
三/さん/3
四/よん/4
五/ご/5
六/ろく/6
七/なな/7
八/はち/8
九/きゅう/9
十/じゅう/10
百/ひゃく/100
千/せん/1000
Now, those are the ones I’ve encountered via my academic studies (aside from one other but that’ll come up in a moment). There’s more, and here’s where it gets interesting.
In English, we organize high powers of 10 into names based on groups of 3 (thousand = 10^3, million = 10^6, billion = 10^9, etc.). Based on some quick research I did online, Japanese does it a bit differently. In that language, powers of 10 get names based on groups of 4. The names are as follows:
万/まん/10^4
億/おく/10^8
兆/ちょう/10^12
京/けい/10^16
垓/がい/10^20
嬢/じょう/10^28
溝/こう/10^32
澗/かん/10^36
正/せい/10^40
載/さい/10^44
極/ごく/10^48
I skipped 10^24 because it has 2 pronunciations and kanji and I can’t tell which one better describes the “pure” number like the rest of these do, so I’ll list them both.
𥝱/じょ/10^24 OR 秭/し/10^24
There’s more, but once you get to 10^52, the same word can be used to refer to different quantities. So for the sake of simplicity I’ll stop at 10^48.
So what are some interesting things we can pull from this?
Well, as it turns out, because of how it’s organized, both English and Japanese have unique words for (at least as far as my list contains) numbers of the form 10^12n where n is a positive integer (including 0 too!).
Also, if you were to play the number -> letters in number -> number of letters game in Japanese, using hiragana as a base for letters as it’s roughly analogous to the English alphabet, a few interesting things occur.
(Before we do that, though, let me explain how large numbers with lots of different digits are named. The way it works is for any given number, look at the non-zero digits and write the number name follows by its corresponding place value. So, for example; 251 is 二百五十一 in kanji and にひゃくごじゅういち in hiragana. 404 is 四百四 in kanji and よんひゃくよん in hiragana (notice that 0s aren’t written, similar to how we don’t include them in cases like 101’s “one-hundred one”). Some words, like 800 have unique pronunciations (for 800, it’s pronounced はっぴゃく as opposed to はちひゃく like you’d expect, even though the kanji is the same), but aside from these exceptions, the general rule applies to most numbers of this form.
So, what interesting things do we see? Well…
One, you notice that in terms of hiragana count, many of the numbers listed here contain no greater than 3 hiragana characters unless they are composed of multiple different digits. That means you are very likely to fall to 1, 2, or 3 eventually. And the ones that contain 3 will just to go 2 anyways.
いち/1、さん/3、よん/4、ろく/6、なな/7、はち/8、せん/1000、and all the named high powers of 10 sans 10^12, 10^28, and the second spelling of 10^24 (which contain 3, 3, and 1 respectively) contain 2 hiragana characters and as such will immediately fall to に/2. However, since 2 only uses 1 hiragana character, 2 and 1 form a cycle. (Also, rather obviously, any 1 character number falls into that cycle).
Two, there are no numbers in Japanese that contain the same number of hiragana characters as their value. For all the basic digits, 100, 1000, and high powers of 10, the number of hiragana characters is either 1, 2, or 3. For all numbers 4 or greater, that’s too small. 1 has 2 characters which is one too many, 2 has 1 character which is one too few, and 3 has 2 which is one too few. For all the other numbers, the ranges of characters they can contain are as follows, up to 9999.
11-99: 4-9
101-999: 4-15
1001-9999: 3-20
As you can see, the upper bound for characters count maximum compared to the number smallest number in the list separates at incredible speed. There’s a decently easy way to calculate the bounds.
For the lower bound, for any n-digit number, take the base 10 logarithm of the number, round down to the nearest integer, and raise 10 to it. Whatever power of ten you get, find the corresponding word for it. Take the number of characters in the word and add 1. (I know there’s a less jargon-y way to explain it, but I find it hard to verbalize). The reason we add 1 is because the lowest you can go is the power of 10’s amount of characters plus another digit’s character, and both 2 and 5 contain one character, which is the smallest amount you can add. For each range, the smallest number that sits at the lower bound is as follows:
11-99: 12 (じゅうに、4 characters)
101-999: 102 (ひゃくに、4 characters)
1001-9999: 1002 (せんに、3 characters)
For the upper bound, for any given n-digit number, you will always use the number of the form 10^(n+1) - 1, because 9 has the most characters out of all the 1 digit numbers, so this number will be an n-digit long string of 9s. This also means that numbers of these forms are the ONLY numbers that maximize hiragana count. The way you calculate it is like this: however many digits are in the number, multiply that by 3. Then add the amount of characters for each positional number. So, the numbers are as follows:
99: きゅうじゅうきゅう、9 characters.
999: きゅうひゃくきゅうじゅうきゅう、15 characters.
9999: きゅうせんきゅうひゃくきゅうじゅうきゅう、20 characters.
More importantly, because every digit and positional number contains 3 characters at most, this means that every n-digit number will contain less than or equal to 6n-3 characters. (Which aligns with the data we manually showed).
So, If n is number of digits, then 10^(n-1) is the quantity of the lowest number with that amount of digits, and 6n-3 is the absolute highest amount of hiragana characters an n-digit number can contain. Since quantity grows exponentially and character amount grows linearly, and both are constantly increasing, and the only intersection of the functions occurs at a value less than 2, that means there’s absolutely no chance for intersection beyond n = 2. This all means that any number with at least 2 digits will always have less hiragana characters than it’s amount.
One small caveat though is that 6n-3 doesn’t remain the upper bound forever, because the way numbers are written after 10,000 are slightly different. But, in the grand scheme of things, it will still increase linearly, and the gap has gotten so wide to that point (a size of 9979) that any non-exponential additions to the hiragana count that adhere to how the numbers are written are basically irrelevant.
So, ultimately, all of what we just discussed shows that no number in the infinite spectrum of natural numbers greater than 4 will ever contain the same amount of hiragana characters as it’s value because the value will be too high compared to character amount, and for the rest (1, 2, and 3), it’s pretty easy to show that there’s no number where value = character count, meaning those numbers don’t qualify. Therefore, there is no number in Japanese that contains the same amount of hiragana as its value, and all numbers eventually fall to the 1 -> 2 -> 1 -> … cycle.
With that, I post my comment. I’m sure there’s more to this topic, but I’ve already written a lot of stuff and don’t particularly feel like writing more lol.
Great video as always, Domotro!
I'm working on making a list of as many numbers as possible in alphabetical order. I just wrote out by hand the first 226, ending with "eight billion eight hundred million eight hundred thousand eight hundred two". We should be able to work out the order of the first billion - everything that starts with "eight billion". I'll try to write some code tomorrow to do that. If I get it, maybe i'll upload the code and the output to github. I'll either reply to this or update this if i do that.
Edit: I missed about a hundred million numbers before “eight billion eight hundred million eight hundred thousand eight hundred two”
Once I had a job at a local library where I had to check the alphabetical order of the books in the shelves. Multiple bands of e.g. a dictionary, say parts 1 to 6, had to be arranged in their appropriate alphabetical order. That felt extremely weird, as I was thinking of numbers in terms of their numerical value.
visiting this man house will be so fun
J was a medieval addition to the Roman alphabet. The names of the larger numbers come from latin prefixes so doesn't turn up in those.
Other languages are quite different. Similar principle, but they end up on a different number. Czech language ends up on number 3.
Ah the letters game...
In Swedish it's
0-noll
1-ett
2-två
3-tre
4-fyra
5-fem
6-sex
7-sju
8-åtta
9-nio
10-tio
11-elva
12-tolv
Thus both 3 and 4 are end points. So while 0,4,11,12→4 1,2,3,5,6,7,9,10→3
And most numbers end up at 3.
Interesting!
As a child learning the numbers when visiting family in Sweden I always recited 1 as "en" (i.e. common gender), but as an adult it seems as though the canonical form when talking about the number in itself (rather than the indefinite article) seems to be "ett" (i.e. neuter gender). I'm curious about what conventions there are regarding that, if any. Is it something that has changed over time, I wonder? Or perhaps it was an idiosyncracy of the person teaching me the numbers.
this is like what robots who've learned English like to think about
If you were to reintroduce the long scale then the second number in alphabetical order would actually be Eight Billiard (8e15) since the -ard part starts with a
In Russian also has interesting patterns with letters and numbers. But it will be difficult to explain all of them, since Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet. For example, there are letter-number cycle with numbers 5-4-6, and in some cases it ends on number 3 or 11.
Beautiful cat 😸😸
in Ojibwe using the double vowel system of writing:
1 - bezhik
2 - niizh
3 - nswi
4 - niiwin
5 - naanan
6 - ngodwaaswi
7 - niizhwaaswi
8 - nshwaaswi
9 - zhaangswi
10 - mdaaswi
how to pronounce:
1. e is always a long vowel and sounds like the e in meh except said longer
2. zh is like sh except with a z
3. the n and m without vowels (as in nswi and mdaaswi): imagine there is an i before the n or m but don't say it. so the n would sound like the n in the word minute
4. the double vowels have slightly different pronunciations than the single vowels: for naanan, the aa would sound like a prolonged ah and the nan sounds more like nun. it's a quick little a that kind of sounds like a u. in some dialects, the single a is replaced with u. for niiwin, the ii sounds like the double e in knee and the i sounds like the i in winter
5. the pronunciation is sort of like German in that every syllable is spoken and like Japanese in that almost every consonant has a vowel. so, ngodwaaswi is said n-go-dwaa-swi
i think that's it for pronunciation rules. since Ojibwemowin (a dialect of the Algonquin language) is somewhere around 15000+ years old, we didn't need super big numbers. the source i got the numbers from (www.languagesandnumbers.com/how-to-count-in-ojibwa/en/oji/) says numbers up to only 1999 have been named
at least our number 1 is alphabetically first haha
In German, the first number would be 8 (Acht). Since we do *always* spell some numbers including "und", it should be followed by 8 quadrillion if you don't count a blank space; because we have two similar words to describe thousands of a quantity of millions or above. A million is Million, but a billion is Milliarde. So "Billiarde" would be next, which is 10^15.
So I think the order is 8; 8*10^15; every number in the 8-to-9 quadrillion range;....
I think the long scale is more logical!
Eight billion eight should be third! After that not counting spaces as a character, you get eight billion eighteen and eight billion eighteen hundred, followed by 9999 entries, with eight billion eighteen thousand at 10005th place! (At least if I accounted for everything)
I haven’t double checked all those (maybe will later) but good calculations!
eighteen hundred is probably going to be non-standard, but I love that you put in the work on these!
@@BalderOdinson you're totally right, I meant eighteen thousand (which is why there are 9999 entries after it!)
You said "not counting spaces" but thats something to look at. Computers will count spaces as coming between the end of the word and 'a'. So for example, a computer would say the following are in order: 'eight, eight hundred, eighteen', but not counting spaces would be 'eight, eighteen, eight hundred'. As you can see, this changes the order quite a bit.
In portuguese we get 2 roots:
Our numbers from 0 to 10 are:
0= zero
1= um
2= dois
3= três
4= quatro
5= cinco
6= seis
7= sete
8= oito
9= nove
10= dez
5 has 5 letters, so it maps to itself: 5->5
4 has 6 letters and 6 has 4 letters, so: 46
Interesting!
In Spanish, the number 1 is pronounced "Uno", which has 3 letters and 2 syllables. However, 1 has 3 genders and each is pronounced differently. "Uno" is male, "Una" for female and "Un" when it's neutral. Now, if you're in a hurry, you might just omit the U and say "N" for 1.
The number 2 is "Dos", with 1 syllable and 3 letters. But in some regions, the final S has a mute pronunciation, so it'll sound like you're saying "Do".
3 is called "Tres". Same as 2, it can sound like "Tre"
4 is "Cuatro", but just like with 1, if you're in a hurry, you can omit a letter, I this case the final O, and keep the meaning. So it's "Cuat"
5's name is "Cinco", which thankfully has 5 letters. It can also be abbreviated as "Cin", but we're not gonna use that now.
So, in Spanish, you could count and go "N, do, tre, cuat, cinco" and each numbers would have as many letters as the amount they represent if you only count the letters that are actually being pronounced.
6 sadly breaks the pattern, since it's pronounced "seis" and there's no way to turn that into 6 letters.
From now on I'm going to use Sodd and Lodd for 7 and 11
Fun fact: "negative fifteen" and "negative seventeen" both contain their absolute value of letters. But neither of those is as satisfying or homological as "four"
This video made me realize that the analogue for “threeven” with sevens is… “seveneven?”
Also, eleveneven?
I usually say "seeven" and "eleeven". However, multiples of 7 or 11 are less common than multiples of 2 or 3 (or even 5 which could be feeven), so are less crucial to nickname-ify than threeven haha.
Yeah I also don't like how Seven has two syllables lmao
I remember I got bored before and came up with more standard number names for fun
Also ye that alphabetising number names bit was interesting too, basically would have to take the integers 0-999 and organise them, then determine the order of the different powers of a thousand to get sections
cats
Dutch:
Een
Twee
Drie
Vier (ha! Again)
Vijf
Zes
Zeven (here, too!)
Acht
Negen
Tien
Elf
Twaalf
In German:
Eins
Zwei
Drei
Vier (yay!)
Fünf
Sechs
Sieben (smug bastard)
Acht
Neun
Zehn
Elf
Zwölf
Dreizehn...
In Russian, they have a different wird for 1, depending on wether you go on counting (then it sounds like razz, dwa, tri,...) or not, then it sounds like Addin.
In Latin and Italian, Spanish, French etc., 4 has many more letters, starting with q: quattro, quatorze, and their 7 behaves more like the rest.
3:56 What about things like “eleven hundred” and “fifteen hundred?”
Those are considered unofficial nicknames here too since they have more official number names
We should call Seven & Eleven Sodd & Elodd. In German, eleven is elf.
In Portuguese (and probably spanish too), 5 (Cinco) is the fixed point, not 4!
Nought for zero is a legitimate name.
Next grade would be -√ ̅3/2+i/2 ?
(spoiler: next clock position after -1)
Ignoring spaces; eight, eight billion, then one billion other numbers that all start with "eight billion". Though, there may be number prefixes so big that they come before billion alphabetically.
After some googling: there *is* a prefix that comes before billion. That would be Attillion, one Attillion is equal to 1 followed by 3 quintillion (and 3) zeroes.
Another thing i found while googling is that there is a number that does have the letter K, Killillion. Its 10^(3(10^3000)+3). Z also has Zeptillion (10^(3(10^21)+3)). J is the furthest out with Mejillion (10^(3(10^(3(10^3,000,000)))))
Those aren't standardized terms. If we allow any nickname for numbers, then this list would keep changing, which is why I based it on a particular standardized system of larger number names.
5:34 so you want us to call 7 sodd and 11 elodd??
In some countries 1000 millions are called a milliard. And a billion is 1000 milliards etc, Here in Scandinavia.for instance.
Don't forget about w, only letter with more than one syllable
You just went through the whole alphabet in your head, didn't you?
I vote 'seve' and 'eleve' or something, since English these days doesn't end words in v as often
German:
Acht=8
Drei=3
Eins=1
Fünf=5
Neun=9
Null=0
Sechs=6
Sieben=7
Vier=4
Zehn=10
Zwei=2
nothing with J and K too I think, and counting letters would also get stuck at Vier=four I think
Zen?
@@deltalima6703 Zehn* kind of happy that I slowly unlearn german haha
In russian, the word for 11 (одиннадцать) has 11 letters and the word for 3 (три) has 3 letters
And there's also one cycle: 4 (четыре) - 6 (шесть) - 5 (пять) - 4 - ...
God Russian numbers are weird. I remember learning the tens and was just totally stunned that they go from ending in цать for 20 and 30 and then suddenly 40 is сорок (which isn’t even related to the word for 4 at all). Immediately following, 50 and 60 end with десять (stress on last syllable) and then in 70 and 80 the stress goes to the second to last syllable for some reason. Finally, 90 just decided it wants to be really freaking weird and be девяносто
@@alexzgreat133 70 and 80 have stress on the first syllable though
90 has second to last
trying this thing with toki pona:
ala (0)
wan (1)
tu (2)
tu wan (2+1)
tu tu (2+2)
luka (5)
luka wan (5+1)
luka tu (5+2)
luka tu wan (5+2+1)
luka tu tu (5+2+2)
luka luka (5+5)
ala = 0 or nothing
wan = 1
tu = 2
luka = 5 or hand
mute = 20 or many
ale = 100 or all
loops: 2, 4, 6 and 7, 8 and 9,
0 -> 3 -> 5 -> 4
1 -> 3
10 -> 8
12 -> 10
this is the point where i don't care enough to do this
The cat appears again
Any number between eight billion and eight billion eight alphabetically?
Sodd, eight, nine, ten, elodd. Fixed.
In turkish:
1=bir
2=iki
3=uç
4=dõrt
5=beş
6=altı
7=yedi
8=sekiz
9=dokuz
10=on
In english fifty one over three,fifty four over three,fifty seven over three and one hundred thirty two divided by two plus five minus four minus plus five plus four
When you became a mad mathematician did it hurt?
3rd one would be Eight Billion (and) Eight
15:54 Centillion has C at the start
To fully write centillion, its full name would be written “one centillion” which contains a c but doesn’t begin with it
The english should have adapted the german way of saying eleven. Elf.
We call the number 11 "Elf".
You ignored Eight in the odd number / e connection.
ST 39 + ONE 34 *73
You can split 11 into 2 beautifull equally even Ones! 11 Is the Most Even number of them all!
Another number where all we are even is 00..
A Kajillion
Duodecillion
no it would be one duodecillion like he explained with one billion
Is the next number after eight billion in alphabetical order, eight billion eight?
Problem fixed: use Sod and Elod.
Fuark I'm here early
Ten should be called onety and eleven should be called onety-one
#3 Eight Billion Eight
Finish this: there are ___ E’s in this statement. (In word form, and ignore the capital E)
7 and 11 work, but are they the only ones?
@@wyattstevens8574 only 7
Wait we have evan threevan so why not seven
Z is for zillion
In my language Bangla seven is correct (shat) but eleven still is wrong (agaro) and I know it cuz ten and twelve(dosh and baro)
I am First!
yes you actually are. congrats
You commented this three hours ago, and this video released 2 hours ago (As of writing this), so therefore you are the -1st person to comment, not 1st
@@CubeCatSittingOnWater timezone differences lol. I am in New York timezone (Myrtle Beach).
What about zeptillion? Without zero “z” would show up eventually 😂.
Septillion? I don't think "zeptillion" is an actual number.
@@wyattstevens8574 Look it up. It is an insanely large number.
@@miyagikot1798 10^21?
@@wyattstevens8574 10^(3*10^21+3) or 10 to the power of 3 sextillion and 3 which is much much much larger than a septillion (10^24).
@@wyattstevens8574 Look up Jonathan Bowers’ “illion system” for more information on large numbers like zeptillion.