Re: decimal separator (international?

[jcb@inf.ed.ac.uk (Julian Bradfield)]

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In article <8h34o0dbc2h70ojvsst879nfkthko7suok@4ax.com>,
Stefan L�rchner  <me@privacy.net> wrote:

>How on earth do anglosaxons (or is it only Americans?) call their
>numbers above one billion???

Realistically, it is now Americans and Brits (not all of whom are
Anglo-Saxons!). There are still a few people like me who refuse to
give utterance to the American versions, but if I used the British
billion, I would confuse almost all of my compatriots. Sometime in the
1970s, the Treasury announced it would start using American billions,
because all the numbers it wanted to talk about were of that
order. That infected the rest of society. Confusingly, the French used
to use the American system (they invented it both).

In the (former) British and current German system, an
n-illion is 10^(6*n) and and
n-illiard(e) is 10^(6*n+3).

In the (former) French and current American system, an
n-illion is 10^(3*(n+1)).


To be fair, the -illiard words have always been problematic in
English, because they have an unnatural pronunciation. They are 
pronounced /'mili'a:d/, with a long final a, and (according to me)
more or less equal stress on the first and last syllables, but if
they were real English words (like billiard(s)!), they'd be pronounced
/'milj@d/. "Million" and "milliard" would then be too similar.
For this reason, I always say "thousand million". But that gets pretty
tedious, and it's tempting to give up and use the American system!
But I shall be strong.

Frank, 10^42 is a lot easier in both speech and writing than either
"septillion" or "tredecillion".