Wonderful words for big numbers
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- Опубликовано: 11 июл 2024
- The history of the word hundred is guaranteed to surprise you. As are the stories behind so many English words for big numbers. Where does the word thousand come from? How much is a milliard? How many in a myriad? What’s a British billion? And what are lakhs and crores?
Allow me to answer these questions and more as we explore the etymology of massive numbers.
*NO MATHS KNOWLEDGE REQUIRED*
==LINKS==
Letter thorn: • LOST LETTERS OF THE AL...
William the Conqueror & English: • French words in Englis...
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==CHAPTERS==
0:00 Introduction
0:54 HUNDRED - long hundred, twelfty
4:08 THOUSAND - swollen hundred
5:29 MYRIAD - how much & how to use it
7:19 A friendly interruption
7:42 LAKH & CRORE - how much & why
8:42 MILLION - origin
9:28 MILLIARD - how much, billiard & trilliard
11:00 GOOGOL - googolplex, googolplexplex history
11:50 GOODBYE
Also in Urdu possibly in Hindi as well we have words like "Areb" which is a 100 Crore or exactly a Billion and "Khareb" which is 100 Areb or 100 Billion
Some sources say there is another word "Nīlem" which is 100 Khareb or 10 Trillion, but I've never seen it being used
So traditionally speaking in Hindi/Urdu the highest you can count is 10 Nīlem or 100 Trillion
My comment got pinned?!!!
Dude, no frickin wayyy
Btw thanks 😊😊😊
It goes on in Hindi, my mom taught me counting in Hindi and I learnt the system went like lakh, crore, arab, kharab, neel, padma, shankh. In practical usage though, I have never heard anything after arab. We measure the world population as 7 arab plus. But after that, even news and books shift to billion and trillion.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system
I like that India's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire uses the term "crorepati" in place of millionaire, which means Indian contestants win 10 times more than a million (in rupees, but 10 times less then a million in pounds).
@@AkshayVasant agree, but while those words are known in the counting systems of South Asia, it is important to remember that only lakhs and crores made their way into English. For example a cheque written in India will say “one lakh”, not “one hundred thousand”. The other words you named do not make it into written or spoken English.
We also have Padma (100 Nēil) and Shankh (100 padma), where the highest number we ever needed to measure was 10000 shankh...
Thank you for covering Myriad. It means a lot.
Well done!
Haha 😄
Indeed the right place to play with words ;)
As well, one can at least Google myriameter = 10 km
Plethora.
Back in the 80s I worked as a foreign exchange trader, often specializing in the Japanese Yen. Whenever I called a bank in London to get a quote for a specific quantity of Yen, I’d express it in “yards”, which was short for “milliard”. But when calling a bank in New York, the quote would be expressed for millions. Switching between milliard and million was a skill in itself.
Not true
@@ronaldnixon8226because I’m definitely gonna trust Ronald Nixon
@@ronaldnixon8226 Explain?
11:34 i’m sure someone’s already pointed this out but, edward kasner’s nephew originally coined googolplex to mean “one followed by as many zeroes as you can write until you get tired”, until kasner reworked it to be more mathematically rigorous. it’s a lot like the origin of “thousand” in that way, actually
Actually, permille (written as "promile") is used pretty often. While talking about beer, "promile" is used to specify the amount of alcohol in blood.
In other words: your myriad of beers will leave you with a few permilles :)
what about the ‰o?
@@gabenugget114
% = per cent
‰ = per mille
@@KodakYarr i mean the per myriad
@@gabenugget114 don't think "per myriad" is used. But in chemistry and pharmacy, for really small amounts (or concentrations) "parts per million" and "parts per billion" are used, no special symbols, abbreviated as ppm and ppb.
At least in America, a mill is still used by real estate agents, as tax rates on the properties are measured by the thousandths (so relating to mille). They also use the term millage. Though I think most Americans would rather not use the term as we tend to be fond of our own usual versions of counting.
According to a fair amount of numberphile videos quite a lot of british scientists would immediately agree with you on that comment you've made in this video about reinstating the long counting system including milliards and billiards as soon as possible.
Well now, that's kind of the point, isn't it? Numberphiles emphatically are not scientists, they are number-lovers! You'd get better stats from lab scientists and engineers who use modern number prefixes to be as precise as possible when communicating critical data.
Yes, modern large-number words are messy and ugly, but they are also _understood,_ without ambiguity, by the vast majority of English-speaking scientists, engineers, and economists.
I love the history of words, and can recall poring through dictionaries as a child to find out where a word came from and how new words were created. But let's not forget that the central purpose of words is not just history, but something called communication. If you forget that part of it, you lose track of why we have all these funny sounds coming out of our mouths in the first place.
@@TerryBollinger You're right, words and speach are more about communication than about anything else. In order to avoid those ambiguities you rightfully mentioned in your comment scientists more often than not use the so called 'scientific notation'. Using this notation the number 1,000 for example becomes 1*10^3 which is as unambiguous as it can get.
@@TerryBollinger No, most of us are mathematicians and would never want to be associated with something so crass and vulgar as the sciences. But one thing we mathematicians are not is ambiguous, we go further out of our way than any other discipline to precisely define our terms, sets, objects, and, indeed, anything we work with. And people have created conventions for base 12 arithmetic, none of which are any more ambiguous than the standard system of base 10 arithmetic.
Ultimately, mathematicians are the only people who use numbers in such a way that the radix of the system actually matters (except maybe computer engineers, but they're forced to work in base 2 no matter what), if you're just going to turn everything into a decimal and not worry about exact solutions it really doesn't matter if you're using base 10 or base 12 or base 23, it's all completely arbitrary.
@@costakeith9048 that was a fun read, thanks! Now, to be precise, there have been periods of time when computer designers experimented with other bases, including base 3 and, my all-time favorite, base -2 (try it, it's fun!)
You might be surprised how much I've been looking into the issue of mathematical precision in the past few months, such as how the utterly non-physics-compatible trick of using piecemeal functions with hidden infinities at their edges to achieve oh-so-comforting infinite differentiability in distribution functions that, at their limits, are used to formalize the casually introduced Dirac delta function. Ah, and sets... what an astonishingly cognitive-capability-dependent concept those are!
Math is incredibly powerful, but it has... well, interesting issues, not the least of which is that until mathematicians recognize and formalize how much their survival-shortcut-designed brains are contributing to their emotions of "certainty," it is impossible to be formal in a fully precise way.
@@costakeith9048 In computing hexadecimal is more common than binary as it's easier to work with but converts to and from binary very simply. Practically speaking in computing there are only three numbers; zero, one and many.
Interesting to note that there is also a word for ten thousand in Chinese and many other East Asian languages. The Chinese word is 万, pronounced "wan." That's why you often hear phrases like "may the emperor live ten thousand years," because in the original Chinese, it's just "may the emperor live a 万 of years."
So essentially it is the Asian version of "myriad" except still used in it's original meaning. "May the emperor live a myriad of years" would be a great way to translate it because in this context it's a metaphorical 万 and not a literal 万.
This is what the Japanese "banzai" and the Korean "manse" translate to as well.
Isn't there also an idiom where "the ten thousand things" means "everything", kind of like "the universe"?
And the Chinese say "yi" (億) or "wanwan" (萬萬) for 100 million.
I know that from the number tiles in mah jong. Some sets use a different character for "ten thousand" though.
(Apparently the suits all originally represented numbers of coins. The circles are individual coins, the "bamboos" are really strings of 100 coins, and the character tiles represent myriads of coins.)
@@MattMcIrvin And wan is sometimes written as 卍!
@@Blaqjaqshellaq four sided shuriken strikes again! The manji and swastika are related symbols. Actually buddhism ended up spreading Indian symbols like the lotus and the swastika throughout asia, but it also carried with it Sanskrit. Some very common Japanese and Chinese words originate from Sanskrit (zen->dhanya)
In dutch, especially because being proficient at english is extremely common, large numbers after a million can start becoming very confusing.
In dutch, we go from _miljoen_ (million) to _miljard_ (milliard) to _biljoen_ (billion) to _biljard_ (billiard) to triljoen (trillion)
so million, milliard, billion, billiard, trillion. while in english that'd be million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion.
This is so confusing that I once herd a university professor express chance as being nearly "one in a _biljoen_ ".while he meant to say _miljard_ , confusing the english billion for the dutch biljoen
But it's a regular and defined convention. I'm pissed off that again something irrational but American won.
You take multiples of 6 zeroes and that's the -ion base for the number. A thousand times that is a -iard.
It could have been so simple.
We use the same words - miljard, miljoen, biljoen, triljoen - in Afrikaans, a language spoken in South Africa, and of which Dutch is one of the parent languages. Sadly, due to global linguistic influences, these words are starting to only be used by language purists.
Same thing in german. The worst however is that most people don´t even know about it and think a english billion is a Billion instead of a Milliarde. Makes reading news hilarious sometimes...
Interestingly and completely unrelatedly, Dutch has a word for 100,000 in money that is occasionally used more widely: a _ton_ that survived the transition of _gulden_ to Euro.
I was bizarrely first taught the "british billion" scale as a kid in the 90s, but then everything else used the modern one. It left me really confused, knowing there had been a change but not understanding why/when, perpetually gaslit by my confused understanding of the correct representation of the number.
This language business is serious business, it broke a small boy's mind!
same.... in particular, as in my mothertongue German a billion remained a million million....
@@andreasrehn7454 Yes, except when Germans speak in English and use the short billion so I never know for sure. Using a thousand million for a billion is wrong. But the Americans also adopted the smaller gallon for volume. Ban this old words for metric prefixes and be done with it.
The US billion has its base in the financial sector. Essentially the super rich wanted a way to differentiate between the 1 000 000+aires and the 1 000 000 000+aires as they were essentially different classes. The word "million" was already in common usage, so to use a similar word such as "billion" was done for simplicity.
So the answer as to "why" is capitalism and status basically.
It hasn’t changed the Americans just believe it has
@@Dancestar1981 Yeah but they'll damn well make sure _everyone_ knows about it!
You've just explained my confusion with Billion when I was growing up in South Africa in the 70's. I was taught it was a Million Million at school but after school I hardly used the word for a while. Being in computers the number soon became common but I was now living in UK (in the 80's) and I was arguing with people about my version of Billion vs their version of Billion. Your video has just made sense of it all if the value changed in the 70's. My memory isn't kaput after all!
That's also the reason for the word: bi-million. Followed by tri-million etc., each time with another six zeros added.
@@magnushultgrenhtc 👍
Kaputt has two ts :-)
@@beageler Not in English.
@@jishcatg Let me guess, you were one of the ones responsible for "literally?" That is like literally cool!
Heck-a-ton definitely sounds like a good term for something there's a lot of.
Certainly more friendly than "sh*t ton" which a hear a lot around here.
@@rmdodsonbills Depends if you think the fires of H are less scary than a useful amount of natural fertilizer.
@@johndododoe1411 The fires of heck?
We also use f*ck-ton occasionally here in Canada, in addition to sh*t-ton. Not sure what the equivalent metric or imperial would be but it's a lot either way
@@12what34the hilariously, a lot of people in the States will use use "metric sh*t-ton" to mean a larger quantity than whatever a normal sh*t-ton is. I have no idea why since metric units are usually smaller than imperial ones, not larger (an inch is larger than a centimeter, a mile is longer than a kilometer etc). Though "sh*t-load" is generally replacing "sh*t-ton" here, which gives up on the ruse of this word referring to an actual number.
So enlightening! As a non native English speaker, these gems of info bursts are so good to know. Especially in my case, as I gradually reduce my use of English and forgetfulness seeps in with age, very necessary to revive it. Thank you! Wish you all the best with your venture!
yipeeeeeee- I just happened upon your website. Discovering word
origin has always fascinated me!
I love reading the comments and finding people replying from all over the world.
When I read the original Sherlock Holmes stories I came across the number "three and twenty". As a native German speaker I found this fascinating, since this implied that English used the same strange ordering as German (still) does, but must have switched it around from "three and twenty" to "twenty three" at some point. Only the numbers from 13 to 19 seem to remain in the strange backwards order.
I'd be so interested in hearing what you have to say about this! I also wonder how many English speakers are aware that their ordering is flipped for the numbers from 13 to 19 compared to all the other numbers.
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie
You can still sometimes hear people use "five and twenty" particularly in the context of time (five and twenty past eight). More common in some dialects.
Good point! Afrikaans -drie en twintig
@@jauneetbrun A lot of German reminds me of the archaic English we encounter in nursery rhymes. ("Fourscore and seven years ago" and "Nevermore" also have a Germanic sound.)
But is it really flipped? While counting it is very easy to say the changing part of the word first.
A hundred is a very interesting word, because in pretty much all descendants of PIE language it comes from the same PIE word and it reflects changes that occured in general in those languages. Original PIE word was something like "kmtom", at some point in the east "k" sound became "s" (Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages, e.g. "satam" in Sanskrit, "sto" in Slavic lang.), but in the west it remained "k" ("Centum" in Latin, the letter 'c' was pronounced as 'k' in old Latin, "(he)katon" in old Greek, "he" here is "one" or "single", English word "single" and Greek "he" have the same root ;p).
Later in Proto-Germanic there was a great sound shift and one of the sounds that shifted was "k" that became "h".
It's propably a bit off the topic, but i just find it interesting, how European and even Iranian and Indian languages are conected to each other ;p
It's not off topic at all. It's glorious!
I was waiting throughout the first part of the video when Rob would turn to the term hundred as formerly used in administration and still being used to vacate a seat in the House of Commons (the Chiltern Hundreds).
One theory is that "*kmtom" (hundred) is a contraction of "ten tens" - *dekm(t) being the (likely) PIE word for ten.
A Hundred was also a division of a county in England - as in a county was split into several hundreds.
@@RobWords An even more fun fact about the centum/satem differentiation is that it wasn't defined exclusively by eastness/westness. We actually have some outliers: Tocarian, an Indoeuropan language spoken in odiern Xinjiang, in China (yes, there actually was an IE language in China), even though was considerably eastern, had känt/kante (depending on the variety) as its word for 100. This was a revolutionary discovery and made us rethink about what we knew of the centum/satem origin story.
Now the scientific consensus states that the satem innovation happened later than what we knew of, spreading from the centre of IE influence outwards, and so the only languages that remained untouched by this innovation were the Occidental IE languages, and Tocarian!
Super-fascinating! Absolutely love this channel. Hope you can find time to put up more, I've already consumed what you have up.
"Permille" is actually quite commonly used in German (Promille), especially when talking about blood alcohol contents. We don't pass out at 0.3%, we pass out at 3 PROMILLE🥴🍻
In fact, it has become such a defined word that it almost can't be used in a serious context anymore lol
Precisely the same in Sweden. Promille is almost always referring to alcohol level in your blood, tested via your breath, and mostly when talking about limits for driving.
Exact same thing in Polish, as well.
@@kris7822 except you guys can probably take an average of 5 Permille before passing out😂💪🏼
In the UK, insurance cover is rated per mille - the premium per £1,000 potential payout.
"‰" can be typed on a computer by holding down the Alt key, typing "0137" on the numeric keypad and releasing the Alt key.
So glad Rob left his new friend in the vid! 🤣 This channel is not only interesting and educational.. it's full of humour too!
10k subs? Not any more.. Rob now unsurprisingly has 45k and this vid was only uploaded a week ago. This channel is going places.. 👍👏
Wow. It shows 2 month ago now - and 142 000 subs 😮
152k
The fellow who dropped in had just finished off the myriad of beers Rob left behind.
@@MrVvulf And now more than 200 000!
June 16, 2024.....501k....congratulations
In Italy, where I live, it's not at all uncommon to use the sign ‰ (read "permille") as well as the sign % (read "percento"). The ‰ sign indicates a fraction in base 1000
Same in Sweden
Same in Poland. We have "procent" (%) and "promil" (the same character as Francesco typed). Typically, we use "promil" in only one instance: the amount of alcohol in blood.
Same in Slovenia :)
same in Denmark
@@jarekferenc1149 Same in Germany!
I love these videos! Chock- full of information, yet easily digestible. Thanks for all the hard work.
Awesome as always!
Growing up in the 1970s US, we learned that “billion” meant a lot more to British than it did to us. My classmates were incredulous: “Say what?!” My math teacher couldn’t really explain it though. Happily, back in the day, my father’s engineering career had taken him to Southern Rhodesia. He loved to talk about such things and had long since introduced me to the “British billion,” so I was able to clear up the confusion in class.
Yeah, I am German and it is alwys a little confusing hearing of yet an other billionaire and thinking they have 1,000,000,000,000.
And for those of us whose father's didn't work in Southern Rhodesia and grew up in the USA what is a "British billion"?
british billion is a bi million so 10^12, a trillion a tri million 10^18 quadrillion a quad million 10^24 etc but nowadays a billion is 10^9 trillion 10^12, made more sense as it was though
@@zebbedee thank you
@@JohnRay1969 why not watch the video? ;P
In Slovakia, ‰ ("promile" in slovak) is widely used. For example, until recently it was officially used to measure the amount of alcohol in blood when you got drunk and police pulled you over. Another example is slope measuring, where 5‰ means 5 meters height differance on 1000 meters (trains have max slope of 2,5% - 4% so it is better to use ‰ instead of % in this situation)
We do the same in Denmark 🙂
Promil is used in Hebrew as well to figuratively mean a small fraction, and also to literally mean one in a thousand, or a tenth of a percent. According to the Hebrew Wikipedia entry, it's used mostly in economics and in nature studies. In English I think ppm (parts per million) is more commonly used.
Same in Germany! 🥂🍻🥴🚓
DUI is officially termed 'promillekørsel' (promille driving) in Denmark and refers to the relative amount of alcohol in your bloodstream measured in promille.
In Poland you can have up to 0,2‰ alcohol in blood without punishment, if you drive a car.
I've only recently discovered your channel and every one of your videos I've watched so far have truly impressed me. Excellent work, Rob!
Language reveals so much about a people's conception of reality. And that's why I love this channel. Myriad thanks to you, Rob.
You just answered a question I thought of circa 1995 when I was in first grade. I can remember asking the teacher how come 11 and 12 aren’t “eleven-teen and twelve-teen?” and the kids laughed at me 😂
Now I’m 33 and just got the answer! I love all your videos. I think the sweet spot for your stuff is 10-15 min like your most recent videos. 10/10, can’t wait to learn more stuff I never knew!
It wouldn't be eleven-teen and twelve-teen though, because that would add 10 to those numbers and make 21 and 22. The question is why aren't they called one-teen and two-teen?
@@althejazzman Or something like firsteen and second-teen, since we have thirteen and fifteen not three-teen and five-teen
That made me wonder if the French have some hexadecimal history...
There's 10 kinds of people. Those who know hexadecimal, and F the rest...
@@althejazzman indeed, in Chinese the word system uses their words for 10-1 (ten-one) to mean 11 and their words for 10-2 to mean 12, etc. all the way to 2-10 (two-ten) to mean 20 and 2-10-1 to mean 21, 2-10-2 to mean 22 and so on until they get to their distinct number for 100.
@@HotelPapa100 why don't the French have distinct numbers for 80 and 90? It has always seemed so unwieldy to have to say 4-20 (four -twenty) for 80 and 4-20-10 (four-twenty-ten) for 90. Yes, the French gain some of this tongue time back with their use of the short single syllable word cent for hundred, but still... what's going on with 80 and 90 there?
Our students from India use lakh all the time. The first time I heard it, I was with an Indian professor who explained to me what it means. While new word, I was not that surprised as Thai language also has a designated word for 100,000.
As you mentioned counting to 12, I thought you would also mention the word for 144 (12 dozen).
12 dozen = 1 gross
@@batya7 Thanks, I was not sure, same word in French "grosse".
And I should know the Thai word, but it is that part of vocabulary I don't use often enough to be able to recall it, but that I will understand if I hear it in context.
Thai also has a different word for 10000
@@thaimapping Chai krub.
Although, when I was still very new at speaking Thai, I used "sip pan" and it was understood.
Once upon a time I worked on a project in India, and had to get used to lakh and crore. I had forgotten about these until I saw this video. Speaking about counting by twelves, it's interesting that English has the word "dozen" for twelve of something. This seems to be fading away in the U.S. A few years ago I went into a shop and asked for a dozen donuts or somesuch, and the young lady behind the counter had no idea what I was asking for. But we still buy eggs by the dozen.
Just found your channel about a week ago… love it! Thanks for creating the great content!
Fascinating! Thank you so much!
While there is controversy about the definition of "billion" in English, there is also argument on the definition of a Chinese numerical character 兆 (zhao4 in Mandarin / siu6 in Cantonese). While Mandarin speakers tend to define it as "trillion" (10^12), Cantonese speakers tend to define it as "ten quadrillion" (10^16).
Blimey, that's no small difference
why is there numbers after the letters for English transliteration. is it the intonation
@@chairwood Yes
What does Cantonese call a trillion?
@@Anonymous-df8it 一萬億
I'm old enough to remember the 'proper' billion, and I'm all in favour of bringing it back. The potential for commercial and scientific confusion when one party is not British (or American) must be enormous!
Anyone who needs to know the difference would be using 10^9 or 10^12 depending on the local convention. They would use the number not the arbitrary name we gave it.
@@rogerszmodis Scientists, most likely. Commercial? I doubt that. One place that comes to my mind that would have had (and sometimes still might) to face confusion about the milliard/billion is in the news. And the average Joe on the street that doesn't know english (or only rudimentary) will always be confused by this.
Fantastic and informative as always...... Thank you for these posts, I really enjoy them
Thank you. Your videos are very interesting to watch!
Along the same lines, I once read something about how a number of places where "40" was used in the English translation of the old testament was just in place of a concept of "a big number" in the original language. So "40 days and 40 nights" while Noah was afloat or Moses' 40 years in the desert, etc. were just "a long time" and not literally 40 of those things.
Biblical 40 is literally the value 40 inthe original Hebrew, not "big number." Forty years in the desert, Moses was 40 days on the mountain to receive the Torah.
So some people claim. Others (like another reply) books to the number being literally true.
My own view is that we don't really know either way, and that it doesn't really alter the devotional value of the scriptures anyway.
Apparently the word quarentine is based on the Italian for 40 days which was how long they kept diseased ships offshore until safe to bring them in to port.
Hebrew has/had indeed ways to express large numbers. e.g. EX 38:26: "603550 men". The 40 years was always referred to literally, e.g. Jos 14:10. The ~700 km of journey took months to walk according to the texts, followed by some 39 years mostly camping around Kadesh Barnea. 40 is often said to symbolize "time of ordeal, testing". Also it is said to signify one generation.
@@nilskangas4188 and there is a direct textual reference that it was a generation so that example does not rely on the 40yrs being figuratively a generation.
Of the Israelites who left Egypt exactly two actually entered the "promised land", everyone else of that generation died en route, even Moses himself only got to see the land from a mountain top, according to the scriptural account
Mnemonic poem from my Sunday School days:
Joshua the son of Nun
And Caleb the son of Jephunneh
Were the only two
That ever got through
To the land of the milk and the honey
per mil is used quite often in geochemistry when the differences between the measurements is expected to be only a few parts per thousand.
love these vids😁
A really excellent video. First discovered you on TikTok.
I found your channel a couple of days ago and have been really enjoying going through all your videos! I love finding more people out in the world that are also fascinated by languages and the ways they evolve, and how they relate.
10:43 In my school book of history, it stated that: "there are 7 billion people in the world", which was a bit of a problem because it was a spanish book, so it would be a thousand million or a milliard, (here is more common to hear thousand million than milliard)
it was cool to hear (and then see) you in a DW video =)
You are so perfect at what you do! Thank you for doing it!
I'm still unreasonably annoyed by our adoption of the short billion.
Not unreasonable at all.
I think that Brits and Americans should use the milliard, billiard etc., bringing more harmony between languages.
@@jauneetbrun But Americans won't agree to that, because Americans are "special", in every sense of the word.
I'm one of those cheerfully special Americans, and I hereby do freely confess to feeling a profound sense of peace and joy when, as I grew older, I could finally read a piece of scientific literature and not have to spend minutes trying to figure out whether some large number in the text meant what every _other_ English-speaking scientist in the world meant, or instead was an, um... _special_ use of the word.
@@djtwo2 Like children with "special needs"... ?
Hi Rob, you've found a fascinating niche in which to explore with these videos. Not only do you have a charismatic delivery and good comic sensibilities, but it seems to me you're a language archeologist revealing artifacts from the past that make sense of something we use every day. Its consistently entertaining, and provides lots of 'AHA' moments ( and no, thats not an Alan Partridge reference). I am delighted to see that you are currently experiencing a well-deserved tsunami of subscribers. I dont think you've seen the start of how popular this channel will become.
If you like this type language archeology, I recommend "The history of English" podcast.
Thank you!
Loving your channel all the way from 🇰🇪 Kenya.Keep it up Rob! You should have been my English teacher.
Great to have you on board!
This was a good video. I liked it a lot. Beautiful scripting as always. Super entertaining and so easy to follow especially with the graphics. I love your demeanor:) Please don't change! I'm so happy for all your success and channel growth. I also loved how you kept your friend in the video, that was fun too. Can't wait for the next one.
There were a myriad of reasons I felt this channel was worth subscribing to.
Would love to learn more about whether the subjunctive was used more regularly in English as in Romance languages, and if so, how it might have differed.
As someone presently learning Spanish and constantly falling over this I have only recently gotten my head around 2 things 1/ We tend to use infinitive constructions to convey the same thing / idea, 2/ *ONLY* the 3rd person singular is different from the indicative in all English verbs _except "to be"_ but there are these few ways to get into their train of thinking and "see it in action"; the first is you _MUST_ use / get the word *THAT* as the linking word to make the subordinate clause in the subjunctive 'appear' and secondly, you can only 'see' it in action (meaning a difference in the inflection and spelling of the verbs) if you use the 3rd person singular (except when using "to be") else you won't notice it as different anyway. What is the difference in the 3rd person? *_it drops the 'S'_*
Examples:
Getting the word THAT in it sentence in place of an infinitive. Instead of saying "He needs to buy eggs from the corner shop." say "It is necessary *that* he *buy* eggs from the corner shop. Instead of "He wants her to tidy her room" say "He wants *that* she *tidy* her room. And always incorporating THAT to begin the subjunctive clause:
It's disgraceful *that* the prime minister *lie* to parliament; It's imperative *that* he *understand* spoken Russian; The bank manager hopes *that* he *repay* the loan; Your future success demands *that* you *be* curious.
The English subjunctive IS there, we use (the idea of) it all the time but it's hidden in plain sight either in with the indicative (because the forms for I, you, we & they are all the same anyway) or because we use "subjective infinitive constructions" to convey 'subjunctive' meaning... And this really isn't very well explained by any of the ENGLISH SPEAKING authors of any of the *_myriad_* of 'learn Spanish' books I've read trying to get my brain around poor explanations. _The above examples are my 'foggy' understanding of what appears to work when translating._
Good luck!
This comment is too wholesome, I'm out of here
i love this channel!
I'm 76 and I remember when I realised that American "billionaires", whilst very wealthy, were not quite as wealthy as I'd thought they were.
Rob I discovered your channel yesterday and have watched every video you have. English is my only language and has never been a strong point in my learning. I have always struggled with spelling and grammar.You have a way of making the subject interesting and kind of exciting. Knowing the history of a lot of this actually helps to stick things in my brain. Sure I could do my own research to get this information, but listening to you is much better. Sure hope you can bring us a lot more video's. You have an amazing channel.
I support the reclamation of the milliard; but from a mathematical position. The old sequence was much more satisfying. A m(ono)illion (10^6), a bi_llion ((10^6)^2), a tri_llion ((10^6)^3)… and so on.
I disagree. Yes, it's pretty nice mathematically speaking but you would need to alterate between -ard and -ion suffixes. Million - Billion - Trillion progression is just much more understandable for everyday speech.
Trust me. As someone who has the million/milliard in my language. Its not hard at all to understand.
Nah, we prefer 1000(1000)ⁿ.
1000(1000)⁰ "zerillion" thousand
1000(1000)¹ m-illion
1000(1000)² b-illion
1000(1000)³ tr-illion
etc.
@LoneEagle2061, please check out the @David Sturm reply, its just as logical. And @Bakismannen - trust me, as someone who has the million/milliard in my language, it's really hard to speak to the english speaking world
Your channel is brilliant. Thanks for sharing this interesting stuff
You are one of the coolest people I've ever had the pleasure of listening to - your mind is admirable, I enjoy hearing how you think, fascinating! Stay cool Rob, thank you for your time and effort that you put into your work...! Awesome 👍😎
For me personally, it would be interesting to know more about the conjunctive. I know there are already videos out there in the vastness of RUclips, but your way of explaining helps me best to understand things and phenomena of the English language, not to mention your humour!
I really enjoyed this video. The way Celtic languages still count in twenties (and the way French does a bit) ties in with a hundred being 120. Fascinating stuff.
"He decided I was Polish" LOL
Have you considered making a discord server for you fans? I feel like some really intriguing conversations could come from that. I can set one up for you and manage it if wanted. I imagine that lots of learning could come through that.
7:42 Lakh and crore could be quite useful. We have no words to cover the semantic space between "thousands" and "millions" -- unless you count "myriad" which you mention. Lakh deals with that lack. Crore helps fill the gap between millions and billions. 7:58 Indeed, one could say by crores of people...
0:37 What about a shout out to your old subscribers? :P I love your videos and little jokes!!!
Your stories are awesome 👏
7:20 That man didn't sound German. He sounded Slavic :) He asked What are you doing here
Actually we at the university were taught that thousand actually is connected to French douze cent witch means twelve hundred or 1200. Thats why german and english use dozen or duzent for 12.
Similarity between thousand and douze cent is with big chance from the PiE root of the word
6:50
And *that* is another benefit to listening with captions on. Thank you for including that delightful tidbit.
Edit: ah! it came up in the footage later. Even more fun to see!
Yes! Its time for the billion come back to be million million again. Great channel, I've subscribed.
Being an Aussie....I grew up with a billion being 1,000,000,000,000..... as an adult, I thought the Americans with their "shorter" version were silly.😂
But.... like everyone else, I have given up, and use the smaller American version 🤣
Brit here, same.
Also should there be a long thousand (1,200)?
@@stephenlee5929 probably.....it's just like eggs I guess, they tend to be sold in dozens ( in Australia anyway) or bread rolls ( half dozen, or dozen...and sometimes the Baker's dozen-13 ), and yet my week old fridge only has a tray for 7 eggs ....go figure ?🤣
This Kiwi experienced the same thing, and concurs with your opinion of creeping American linguistic imperialism.
@@heathertruskinger6214 maybe you're supposed to only buy half dozen when you have a single egg left? Or the designers were a bit lazy and just turned out a tray with the number of holes that fit with their tray dimensions rather than designig around more commonly used numbers. Just thinking out loud 🙊
@@heathertruskinger6214 Dozen eggs here too in USA. I will have to use lakh and crore.
Mr. Rob didn't mention score, though I hoped.
Another example of duodecimal language is "dozen" for twelve, "gross" for twelve squared (144), and "great gross" for twelve cubed (1728).
That -red ending can also be seen in "kindred," which means something like "as good as family (kin)."
Does the sport of billiards get its name from the large number?
and "nif" is 36 (ie 6 squared) in the Ndom language. They use base-6 which is a pretty *nifty* way to count.
Yes. Billiards is called that because of the number of points needed to win.
@@Ggdivhjkjl, how long would it take to score a billiard? 🤔
the maximum points you can get in a strike is 10. Lets over-estimate the speed you could play by saying you do a strike every second. - you would need 100 long billion seconds = 10^14 seconds = 3 million years.
hmmmm 🤔
@@JNCressey Does this explain why it wasn't me who won the Euromillions on Tuesday and how many years I'll need to buy a ticket for my turn to come up? (lol)
Base twelve (or base 60, 12 *5) was very common in the ancient world. The year was thought to have 360 days (60 *6 or 12 *30), so therefore a circle is divided 360 degrees, also 24 hours in a day (12 hours sunlight, 12 hours dark on the equinox), 60 minutes to the hour, 60 seconds to the minute. Fractions were also well done in base 60, as "one-third" is much better as "20/60" than our modern "0.33333". Ancient numbering systems can be really fun, just like language.
Yours is one of my favourite channels, and I live in Berlin. I love that you are here too!!
Aw, vielen Dank!
When the metric system was being formulated myria- was almost added as a prefix, similar to kilo-, centi-, etc. A myriameter would be 10,000 m.
it was widely used in local metric systems but was not included in the SI. Myriameter was for example used in Germany extensively.
I would like to see a highway sign in Megameters, to the outer planets
388.6Mm to The Moon ^
The 'long hundred' was used up until the middle of the last century in West Cornwall by fisherman when counting up the number of herring caught. The 'hundred' was, as you say, 120, and they counted the fish by taking three in each hand, twenty times to give 120. They would also refer to a small number where appropriate as a 'half hundred'. They also had a name for a large number of around 10,000, which was called a 'lass' ot 'last'.
Interestingly, some languages emphasize score based counting, calling 60 3-score, 87 as 4 score and 7. Seeing the long hundred in this video made me think it was 6-score, not 10-dozen.
@@johndododoe1411 In traditional Cornish, score was used in counting, just as you exemplify above. In fact, even when English was taking over from Cornish as the main language and in my boyhood days, I can remember the farmers referring to pigs as 'so many score' in weight.
@@tewennow Yep, Cornish uses vigesimal counting similar to French - ugens (20), dew-ugens (40), tri-ugens (60), peswar-ugens (80) as I'm sure you're aware, just pointing it out in case there is anyone here who doesn't know any Cornish ;)
@@johndododoe1411 It’s called a vigesimal system and it’s quite common. French and Celtic languages use it. There’s also sexagesimal (base 60) which we still use today when talking about trigonometry, telling time, and dates (360 degrees in a circle, 60 minutes in an hour, 360 days in a lunar year) because the Babylonians used sexagesimal counting. They used it for the same reason as base-12: really easy to divide it. 12 goes into 60!
Thank you for your knowledge 🙂
Hi Rob, thanks for these numerous facts 😀 A pity you bypassed the Hundredweight aka 112lbs or 8 stones. I guess you could do a video on the weighty subject.
BTW while I was watching another YT video I discovered that you moonlight as a presenter/newsreader on DW 😄That explains Berlin and your fluent German.
As a bonus, I learned what a Polish accent sounds like! Dziękuję Ci
Love the little behind the scenes with your new Berlin friend!
Love the videos. How about one on the origins of the names of musical instruments...piano, Oboe, tuba etc
I’d love a video going through the different terms that refer to time periods! We use these worlds fairly regularly but I’ve never thought about where they came form such as: second, minute, hour, day, week, fortnight, month( I have a feeling it had to do with the moon), year, lustrum, decade, century, millennium and any others I may have missed!!
fortnight is fourteen nights. i don't know about the others tho. i've always assumed that minutes and seconds in the context of time must have come from divisions of a degree but that's probably wrong
@@sidarthur8706 I seem to recall the word 'second' in relation to the time unit comes from it being the second division of the hour, the first division being 'minute'.
In Hebrew, the word for month- chodesh- comes from the word for new, "chadash", because the month begins on the night of the new moon.
In "The Lord of the Rings", Bilbo's birthday party celebrated his turning "eleventy-one" (111). (Eleventy trips off the tongue better than "a hundred and ten" - I was very interested when you explained about the "een" appearing from thirteen.) Tolkien was a scholar of historic English so must've known what he was talking (or tolkien) about.
Well, depends on how you would go about that. Many people say things like "one hundred and ten" and mean 110, but in mathematics that would mean 100.10 (one hundred and 10 hundredths, which then just shortens to one hundred and one tenths).
@@bodyrumuae2914 it does NOT depend! A Hundred and Ten means 110. you aussh0le
@@MrMCLvideo You must not have taken mathematics.
Edit: Was thinking on this some more. Your argument proves you also don't know how to write a check. Public schools tend to teach how to write checks and balance check books in some math classes and economics.
@@bodyrumuae2914 I am not even american (and I am very proud of that), so your imagined feelings of superiourity just because you took mathematics and learned to dissect a normal number that everyday people would use and say are competely invalid. We use millions and milliards, btw. I don't NEED to write checks but, as a matter of fact, I am sufficient enough in english and familiar with american overspending culture that I know how to write 'one hundred and eleven' on a fvcking check! I still think that it does not depend! Just because you're a math nerd doesn't make a hundred and ten 100.10! Also, when you _really_ thought about it, you would have realized that you debunked your own argument when you accused me of being too stupid to even learn basic accounting skills in an underwhelming educational environment. If I write someone a check with the number 110 and the words 'one hundred and ten', they're getting 110$, not 100 dollars and 10 cents 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@MrMCLvideo *One hundred and 11/100
You give us so much information it is worth a second or third viewing to take it all in. Love your channel.
Thanks Susan
I'm Italian and I like your videos soooo much! In part because you look just a little bit like Marc Almond, whose music I appreciate a lot, but mostly because you explain interesting stuff so clearly!
I worked for 15 years as IT teacher in an international school, and my colleagues are British, Americans, and Australians, so i get crazy with their different accents and with their funny divergent ways of naming big numbers! Luckily we seldom need in REAL life a miliardo/milliard/billion "things", but if we were scientists we'd be in trouble! Thanks again for your useful videos!
Hi! Interesting video again. Thank you. Here in Denmark, most people know - and use - the word "permille" - or "promille" as we say. Just like we say "procent" rather then "percent". The reason for almost every Danish speaking knowing the word is quite specific: Promille is mainly used, to express the amount of alcohol in your blood! If you are driving (or sailing or whatever) under the influence of alcohol, and you get knicked, you will have to go to the hospital and have a blood sample taken out. The amount of alcohol in your blood is then measured and expressed as promille or the thousandth gram of alcohol in your blood...
Fascinating video, thank you! I speak Greek (as my second language) but had never really considered what a “myrio” was, even though the connection with “myriad” and “mille” seems obvious enough. (R/L replacement even happens within Greek dialects today). It’s not in current use as an independent word for 10,000; they just say “deka xiliades / δέκα χιλιάδες” (ten thousands). But it does appear in the word for “million”: (h)ekatommyrio / εκατομμύριο, a compound of “(h)ekaton + myrios” which translates as “a group of ten 10,000s.” And sure enough, 10 x 10,000 does indeed equal a million.
This is something that kids educated in Greece probably all know, (Έλληνες, το μάθατε;) but which I never really thought to ask myself. :-)
myrias/myriadis and mille have NO connection, so nothing about r/l replacement. myrias is a 'invented' noun from the adjective myrios which means "numberless/countless" (and was pronounced murios 1kBC btw, just because u nowadays pronounce Y's as I's does not imply it means anything), while mille does not only mean khilioi but also comes from the same root word (+ prefixed "one" like in _semel_ "one times"): sim+khili > smi-khli > smihli > (s)milli > mille
Fun - thanks!
Thank you for not talking down to us. I don’t know any of this stuff, but the way you impart your knowledge makes me feel positive, not negative. I want to learn, not be told I don’t know. Thank you. Be my English teacher anytime!
The number of particles in the observable universe is smaller than 1 googolplex.
Milliards, billiards, etc. make sense in mathematics. The channel Numberphile has a wonderful explanation about it.
Fun fact: some tribes from the Amazon rainforest count only up to three (one, two, many) or sometimes up to five (one, two, three, four, many.) Despite the fact that they have 10 fingers and 10 toes like anybody else.
I see "Hundred" written and sometimes I think about red dogs. Houndrot sounds funny too.
In parts of Papua-New Guinea and some of the surrounding islands, some of the more isolated peoples only have words for 1,2,3,4,5 and many. One of the more interesting explanations is that the human brain can only grasp up to 5 objects in a single glance. Any more than that and we have to count them.
That number only includes protons, neutrons, neutrinos and electrons. It does not include photons, gluons, quarks, dark matter, etc, so the actual number of particles in the observable universe is bigger than 10^80
@@XEinstein science can't currently measure dark matter and therefore we can't count them in. Sabine Hossenfelder has a video explaining that - it's her area if expertise.
Now I finally know where lakh came from! When I was in India, I was fascinated by this way of counting. (It's not hard to spend 1 lakh of rupees)
I am also fascinated the word myriad means 10,000 and how in Chinese numbering system (which also used by the Koreans and Japanese), the number 万 (萬） means 10,000.
I wonder if you could make a clip explaining names that are pronounced completely differently from how they're written? Cholmondely, Gloucester, Worcester and Featherstonehaugh come to mind as a few examples. Thank you and keep those fascinating videos coming!
Definitely the most interesting channel on RUclips by a long way. There's probably a word for precisely how long.
I speak Brazilian Portuguese and the word for a billion is “bilhão” which is similar to what English uses today, however the word for thousand is “mil” which was slightly confusing when first learning the language as “mil” and “milhão” (the word for million) are very easy to confuse when learning a new language
the word million is just an augmentative (kind of the opposite of a Diminutive ) of mille... like in tromba - trombone, viola - violon, melo - melone (literally great apple), calza - calzone (lit. great sock) there are tons of these in Italian. Many exist in diminutive and augemtnative.. as trompetta, tomba, trombone, or violine, viola, violon (cello)
I'm learning EP and "mil" is a tough thing to learn, indeed! It's one of those false-friend sounds that isn't yet automatic- I have to think "três mil isn't three million..." every time I hear it. Same with "antes" ("before before before before"). Practice, I'm sure.
@@andreasrehn7454 violoncello is a small violone, violone being the biggest member of a different family of viole.
In Spanish and Portuguese, a billion is 1,000,000,000,000 (British billion). And what a billion is in Brazilian Portuguese and in American English, in Spanish and Portuguese it is a milliard, 1,000,000,000.
Totally agree about the milliard, billiard, and trilliard! Great sounding words!
Ive always been interested in the different dialects of Britain. Do you have any videos on dialects?
12 being the upper limit of counting is still somewhat present in modern day German and English with the words Dutzend/dozen (12) and Gros/gross (100) and Maß/measure (1000). Although keep in mind that 100 in base-12 is really 144 in base-10 and 1000 is 1728.
Base-12 (and therefore also base-60) is also the basis fur much of mathematical history before the French revolution because it makes dividing quantities and numbers into common fractions, like 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 2/3 and 3/4 clean numbers. You can also count to 12 with one hand, our days are divided into two times twelve hours, words like ounce, from lation uncia meaning one twelveth. Base-60 can be found in angles, hinting at the old Sumerians and their astronomy.
@tacfoley Which are the same numbers, as 100_base12 is 144_base10.
@@Ruhrpottpatriot Base 6 is better.
screws for woodwork the retailer used to open a gross box that had 144 in it and get out the half dozen you wanted
@@Anonymous-df8it Base 6 isn't better. You can't count it cleanly with your hands like base 5, base 10 or base 12, common divisors like 1/4 are not even numbers, and for the rest it's like base 12 or base 60.
@@Ruhrpottpatriot 1/5=0.111111... Now tell me what 1/5 in base 12 is again? Same goes with 1/7. Base 6 can easily handle the first four primes, whereas base 12 has fifths and sevenths that are mathematically the worst they can be. Single digit quarters are not necessary as if you have single digit halves (even number base) and you can't be bothered to remember what a quarter is, it's trivial to derive (halving a half; halving is easy)
Also, with the finger counting bit, if you used your left hand for ones and your right hand to count sixes (so that the person reading it can just read from left to right), you get a base 6 finger counting system!
Permille (promille) is in Finland used to measure blood alcohol level.
Terve Okaro, would you know the numbers larger than miljardia in Finnish. I do not remember, but do you have a mixup like the Slavs thereafter or do you have biljoona, biljardia, triljoona, triljardia, ...?
Awesome content! Talking of Milliard I thought youll mention "Long scale" for huge numbers where after every -ion goes its -ard. Instead of short scale we commonly use nowdays
I fully agree with your idea of returning to make a billion a million millions. In Spanish it is also like that and, as a translator, it always drove me insane when I had to deal with large numbers because you have to be very careful or everything will be really wrong.
By the way, keep your videos coming, I love all of them; and please make one about the great vowel shift.
Hello Rob,
I just discovered your channel and I love it. As ESL (originally from France, now living in Canada), your tips, backed with history, are just a blessing! Thank you!
One thing I always wonder, and maybe you could me a video about it, is why the pronoun "I" is always a capital letter...
maybe because i by itself looks so small and lonely. 🙂
I thought it would refer to a name, but then You, They, She and He should all be capitalised too. I have no idea why :\
I really appreciate you including lakhs (used to be spelt lacs) and crores as they are used more commonly than a hundred thousand, millions and billions even by speakers of English as a first language.
In India, although not it Pakistan, the words are also recognised by the banking system where it is expected to write a cheque or demand draft in lakhs (and crores if you’ve got that much).
Actually English speakers never heard of them
@@Dancestar1981 Mate, that’s a very narrow definition of “English speakers”!
On the subcontinent of the 1.4 billion at least 300 million speak English as their first language. Those words are widely used there with dictionary entries, including the Oxford English Dictionary.
Enjoyed the video. I encountered the English billion as an American student in England in the late 1970s in an Economics class taught by a Greek immigrant. Confused doesn't even begin to explain the situation and my brain still seizes up and spins whenever I think about it. I love the word myriad and look for excuses to use it regularly. I like lakh as well although I wasn't too clear on the comma placement. BTW, you look Polish to me, too! 😃
Thanks Rob,, really enjoy ING your videos and your style of presentating😃; it would be great if you did a video talking about the origins of the words describing the smaller numbers say 0 to 10 I think that would be fascinating (it followed a thought that perhaps the V in five is perhaPS related to the ( Roman numerals) V
I'd like to see a video about words that exist in other languages but that are just a mix of two words in English. For example: peacock, butterfly, cupboard. That'd be very interesting to know if there once was a proper noun for those things in old English.
I don't know, I have no expertise in linguistics, but I would doubt that. One other big language of the germanic family, german, is known for it's compound words. I wouldn't think there never were alternative words, but I wouldn't think it the rule.
I know just 2 Slavic languages and we don't have Trilliard, but Trillion.
So:
A Million
A Miliard
A Trillion
A Quadrilion.... And so on