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Didn't Malcolm Gladwell talk about how the Chinese names for numbers were were closer to their place values and therefore less confusing for calculations? e.g.
by iNate2000 7y ago
Didn't Malcolm Gladwell talk about how the Chinese names for numbers were were closer to their place values and therefore less confusing for calculations?
e.g. "50" is "five-tens" instead of "fifty"
- SomeOldThrow 7y agoYou tell us!
- samch 7y agoYes, in Mandarin, the number 5 is wǔ (五), and the number 10 is shí (十). The number 50 is written as 五十 (I tend to read it as 5*10, or “five-tens” as you put it). I think it makes some simple math concepts easier to understand.
- aloisdg 7y agoEsperanto uses a similar system: 5 is kvin and 10 is dek so 50 is kvindek. If you know how to count to 10, you know how to count to 99. 100 is cent, so 500 is kvincent. 505 is kvincent kvin and 555 is kvincent kvindek kvin. Alright, now you know how to count to 999. A "number to Esperanto" is a great exercise to code and Esperanto is a lovely language to learn. Try it!
- taejo 7y agoThere was a programme where primary-school kids were taught Esperanto as their first foreign language for a year, before switching to French for N years. Not only did those in the programme speak better French at the end than those who had learnt French for the whole N+1 years (which was the hypothesis being tested) but it was also found that many of the kids translated arithmetic problems into Esperanto before solving them and translating the answers back into English.
- interfixus 7y agoQue? "Fifty" is "five-tens", numerically, semantically, and etymologically.
- rtkwe 7y agoIt's no where near as clear as the chinese version which is literally five tens though. To know fifty is 50 and five tens you have to already know both the meaning of number places and what fifty means, really hard to derive from just the name or seeing 50 written out.
- interfixus 7y agoWell, I'm not a native speaker. All I can say is it was crystal clear to me when I began learning English at age ten.
- svachalek 7y agoAs a native speaker I'm with you. Always seemed pretty obvious to me too, especially above 5 with six-ty seven-ty etc. To be fair though, Chinese says/writes 15 as ten-five which is much more obvious than the difference between five-ty and five-teen. It's interesting in spoken English the emphasis flips between first to second syllable though.
- rtkwe 7y agoIt's not super hidden but you also already understood numbers at that age too presumably so you already had most of the puzzle. As a native speaker I don't think I ever broke the words down like that or had them broken down to me like that (then again this would have been ages ago so maybe it was and I don't remember).
- asveikau 7y agoNow that you've written it out I can tell that the "-ty" of "fifty" was probably shortened from some older pronunciation more resembling the word "ten". But I guarantee you that native English speakers are not thinking this in large numbers. This is the sort of insight that comes better when it's not your native language, others of us will just internalize "fifty" as its own word. I guess it's also no coincidence that words ending in -teen are frequently confused with and misheard for those ending in -ty. Edit: Seems like they derive from different Germanic roots for 10.