Hacker News Reader

Comment by computer | Hacker News Reader

Your question contains a very teleological narrative, in that you assume/recognize a natural evolution from the first to the last, with cause and result. Partially because you take all of mankind as one group.

Then, to look at your question: who's your "we"? The Chinese already use another system (in many contexts). African cultures use their own systems. And who knows what might happen in the future.

View on HN

What do chinese and africans use?

Chinese:

零一二三四五六七八九

Africans are a diverse group so I expect that they have many different systems.

Well, those are the numerals 0–9. You're missing 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 1000000… Chinese has a lot of number characters.

They use a system where a power-of-10 number is potentially preceded by a smaller count and followed by a smaller number. So, for example, 241 is represented as [2][100][4][10][1].

Right, they also have:

十 = 10 白 = 10^2 千 = 10^3 万 = 10^4 亿 = 10^8

This leads to the non-Western-like feature that the word for a million is 一白万 (1 10^2 10^4) whereas ten million is 一千万 (1 10^3 10^4) instead of 十白万 (10 10^2 10^4) which you might expect if you think using Western number systems and just internalize the rule that "白万 = million".

To add to vbuterin's comment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_number_gestures

If the OP is correct some Africans used the Egyptian system, tautologicly.

Joke: A Roman walks into a bar, sticks 2 fingers up and says, "five beers please".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com