Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2021 October 8
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October 8[edit]
Are numerals always closed-class?[edit]
I am aware that, in English, numerals are closed-class. Why is this? For example, we have "hundred" and "thousand", but no word for 10000. Perhaps more surprisingly, we have "dozen" and "gross", but the techie/hacker/geek community has failed to come up with analogous terms for 16 and 256. If only powers of 16 had names then we would not have confusion over whether a megabyte is 1000000 bytes or 1048576 bytes.
Are there any languages with open-class numerals? If so, which language(s)? 2601:18A:C500:C00:D00C:6387:4B5F:8135 (talk) 18:54, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
- To be picky, we do have a word for 10,000, namely "myriad", though in modern usage it tends to fuzz out into just "large number".
- I wasn't really familiar with the notion of open and closed classes, but the redirect open class (linguistics) takes you to a nice explanation. If it is accurate, then I question your premise; it doesn't seem to me that English numerals are a closed class, as new number names do get added from time to time. (What is true is that there is no accepted systematic way of creating new numerals that are single words, but that is not really the same thing.) --Trovatore (talk) 19:14, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
- A case in point is googol, which was coined in 1920. Alansplodge (talk) 20:35, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
- There's also lakh for 100,000. It arises from Indian numerics, but as English is a language of India it is used in English. I too don't see how they are closed-class. It's easy to see how new words for numbers could be added, from science, from mathematics, from foreign languages and number systems, even from sport and popular culture.--2A00:23C8:4583:9F01:7849:325C:CE9E:BAA0 (talk) 20:53, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
- The 'pedia also has an article on names of large numbers if you're interested in some rather baroque elaborations, not all of which necessarily really count as core standard English, but which are fun to read about if you're in a certain frame of mind. Oddly, it doesn't call out mega or megiston or Graham's number individually, but relegates them to "see also". --Trovatore (talk) 21:52, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
- There was something like this in the archaic system used in the Uruk period of ancient Sumer. Instead of having an abstract set of numbers that were independent of the unit or thing being counted, there were different counting systems used for counting or measuring different things. It can't have been very convenient overall, although people in any given trade must have thought their own system made sense. Later this was standardized to a consistent sexagesimal system of numbers that could be combined with standard units. In English and other languages there are also lots of slang terms for money that can be used for either for the specific coins and bills, or for the corresponding amounts. So it seems that numerals used in a particular domain or for counting a particular type of thing tend to be a much more "open" class, and abstract general-purpose numerals less so, which makes sense. Also, the Korean language has two separate sets of general-purpose Korean numerals, with rules for how and when each should be used, constituting two complete "closed" classes of numerals. --Amble (talk) 23:21, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
- Concerning the confusion about the number of bytes in one MB, see Byte § Multiple-byte units. Since mega- is not a numeral, it is doubtful that having a number name for 220 would have helped one bit to prevent this confusion. --Lambiam 05:55, 9 October 2021 (UTC)