[Avodah] Billions and Millions

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 10:09:26AM -0500, David Riceman wrote:
: How about hearkening back to your childhood: "hundreds of favors, 
: thousands of favors, millions and billions and trillions of favors" (the 
: original, for those who were differently educated, reads "cats" instead 
: of "favors").

The problem AIUI, was understanding why domeone would say the parallel
to "billions and millions and thousands". Elef alfei alafim is a
billion. Rivei revados is 1/10 that, 100mm. "1000, 1bn, 100mm times..."
sounds weird. As I wrote, I personally think that since "pe'amim"
only appears once, it's not a keifel lashon, but it's all one number,
just like "one hundred thousand" is 100*1000 and in long scale (most of
Europe) "one thousand million" is not one billion, but a number in its
own right. (The US and England at this point only use short scale, where
the word "billion" is defined such that they are equal. In long scale, one
billion is one million million, one trillion is a million billion, etc...)

While detouring into number system, but yet still wanting to stay
somewhere on topic... Ge'ez (Ethiopic, a south semitic language, Hebrew
is NW semitic) has number symbols for 0-9, by 10s for 10-100 and a symbol
for revavah. In comparison, Hebrew has elef between me'ah and revavah,
but no distinct "digit" symbols beyond 900 (if you use sofios for 500-900,
which is probably quite late anyway).

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             The mind is a wonderful organ
micha at aishdas.org        for justifying decisions
http://www.aishdas.org   the heart already reached.
Fax: (270) 514-1507