2758: The World’s Biggest Number Jul 9, 2024

Lots of cultures use what is referred to as an indefinitely large number to express something enormous and uncountable. In English this would be “a million” used in lots of phrases like “thanks a million” or “I did X a million times”, and while it may make sense to use this number in such a context, especially as it is relatively concise as a base unit, many other languages use different ones. For instance, Celtic languages like Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Irish use 100,000, French uses 36, Hungarian 26, and some languages make up numbers altogether such as Swedish’s femtioelva literally “fifty-eleven” (not actually 61).

One number used conspicuously often for this purpose is 10,000, but not simply as a construction. Many languages, especially ancient languages, had a separate word for ten-thousand; compare Hebrew’s 

תשעת אלפים (tishat elfim) = 9,000

רבבה (rivava) = 10,000

עשרים אלף (esrim elef) 20,000

This has the sense of ‘many’ and doesn’t resemble the rest of the words for multiples of a thousand, though in the plural form it can also mean the somewhat uncounted “tens of thousands”. This exact same phenomenon around 10,000-words occurs in Greek μυριάδες (myriades), hence English’s ‘myriad’, Sanskrit’s अयुत (ayuta), and Chinese 萬 (wan) used in many East Asian cultures. 

There are too many examples to count, not even including made up numbers like ‘umpteen’ or ‘bazillion’, so please write back any others you know.

2700: The Non-Roman Origins of Roman Numerals | May 12, 2024

Unlike other letter-based numerals that use the letters in ascending order of the alphabet, like Greek or Hebrew, Roman numerals are more abstracted, and somewhat systematic. For instance, X is 10, and take ½ of that for V (5), which is the top half of X. The X is probably derived from adding on an extra line at the end of a set in an early tally marks system. This works the same in M (1,000) and D (500), but not in the way that you might think. 

These letters are not tied to words, though M was reinforced by Latin ‘mille’ for ‘thousand’, and the original form of M in numerals was ↀ, half of which is D. This originated in pre-Roman Etruscan numerals, that used C (100), IↃ (500), and CIↃ (1,000) and these bracketed-I forms then were written as similar looking letters, and C reinforced by ‘centum’. In fact, though not as typically used, other forms ↁ (10,000) and ↂ (50,000) exist from this system of adding brackets. The shapes of the letters, and some Latin words may have slightly influenced the form of Roman numerals as in the case of ↀ→M, but in almost all other cases (I,V,X,L,D) these symbols only coincidentally looked like letters and have nothing to do with the words they represented.

2531: Order in Welsh Numbers Nov 17, 2021

Welsh numbers are already very complex with two different systems, but part of the complexity is the variation. Celtic languages have many sounds which mutate and different adjectival forms for these numbers, but on top of that the order of the words is not necessarily set. The numbers are stated with prepositions, such as "un ar ddeg ar hugain" (one on ten on twenty) to say '31'. When this is used as a modifier, the noun can be put in the middle of the phrase as well such as "un ar ddeg ar hugain o gŵn" (31 dogs) literally "one on ten on twenty of dogs" which can be reordered as "Un ci ddeg ar hugain", literally "one dog ten on twenty".

2530: Welsh Numbers Nov 16, 2021

People may be aware that French numbers use somewhat mathematical descriptions, like soixante-dix for 70 meaning sixty-ten, and 'quatre-vingts' for 80 meaning 'four-twenties' but Welsh numbers are even more extreme. Indeed, there are actually two different systems, one decimal and one vigesimal. The decimal system operates similarly to English's decimal system, but the vigesimal is base-20 for all numbers so to say '30' it is 'deg ar hugain' (ten on twenty), '40' is 'deugain' (two twenty) and likewise for 60 and 80. To say ‘70’ is 'deg a thrigain' (ten and three twenty) and likewise for 90, but 50 is 'hanner cant’ (half a hundred) which also does not exist in the decimal system. The vigesimal system is more common when talking about dates and ages etc. and people may switch back-and-forth. There are many internal variations as well, including dropping the prepositions, or adjectival forms.

2236: Why Tu BShvat is called 'Tu' Jan 28, 2021

The Jewish holiday of Tu B'Shvat—which just ended if you read this at the time of publication—is named for the date: the 15th of the month of Shvat (שבט‎). 'Tu' (ט״ו) is not a number however though it is seen here and also in the holiday Tu B’Av. Indeed, Hebrew uses a quasi-decimalized numerical system for writing numbers based off the order of the alphabet, as with Greek numerals, but while numbers from ten (י), eleven (יא or 10+1), twelve (יב or 10+2) etc. just go in order that way with addition, 15 and 16 are represented ט״ו‎‎ (9 + 6) and ט״ז‎‎ (9 + 7) as to avoid writing out one of the spellings for a name of Gd. It just so happens טו would be pronounced 'tu', but in normal speech the word would be חמש-עשרה (chamesh-esre).