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BGonline.org Forums
Counting and Language
Posted By: Jake Jacobs In Response To: Counting and Language (Casper Van der Tak)
Date: Sunday, 24 May 2015, at 6:27 p.m.
Bob, as a non-native speaker of the languages I am about to mention, filling out the survey wouldn't help, nor am I sure I could answer some of the more subtle questions, but ...
Chinese counts 1-10 and then 10-1, 10-2, etc. So 323 would be 3-100 2-10 3 (sanbai ershi san). The pivotal unit is 10,000 (wan), so you count to 99,999,999 by saying nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine ten-thousands, nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine. Then, 100,000,000 is yi yi (one yi, or one times 10,000^2). The one exception that occurs to me is a second way of saying two, or "a pair," the word liang, so you could say either erbai or liangbai for 200; knowing when to use which is the sort of knowledge a native speaker acquires.
Japanese and Korean both learned and used and continue to use the Chinese numbers and associated kanji (hanja), with their own differences in pronunciation, e.g. sambaek iship sam for 323. But each has its own native numbers for one through ten, and those are preferred for some things, avoided for others. You would need to learn them case by case. That said, for small ordinal numbers you'd be likely to use them, e.g. in Japanese "turn left at the third light please" would be "mittsu shingo-de, hidari magate kudasai," and not "san shingo-de ..." etc.
Thai is a Sino-Chinese language, and follows the Chinese pattern. You can even hear the similarity: yi, er, san, si, wu, liao, qi, ba, jiu, shi (Chinese); neung, song, san, si, ha, hok, jet, bat, gao, sip (Thai). (Well, maybe you can't hear it, but it's there.)
I don't know if any of this was helpful, but I thought I'd put my liangfen in.
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