I find it very interesting that a large portion of the UK uses yards to measure distances shorter than a few kilometers. I saw a sign that read "Exit - 500 yards" in London the other day.
Chinese uses a 10,000-based ("myriadic") system. Conversion is a gigantic pain. Calling these all "10-based" is more harmful, likely to confuse people, than helpful.
You might consider the powers of ten that get their own unit in each system:
English: 0, 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, ...
Indian: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, ...
Chinese: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 12, 16, ...
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
[I had to look up if the official definition of trillion is 10^18 or 10^24. It looks like a nice question to get a good irrelevant discussion for the coffeetime after lunch, if you can collect a few mathematicians in a Spanish speaking country.]
one, ten, hundred, thousand, myriad, lakh, million, crore.
We have a unique word for each power of ten up to 10^8. That's pretty neat.
Words mean what we want them to mean. If I said there are five myriads of sand grains in an hourglass, what could this possibly mean but 50 thousand?
‘Certainly,’ said Alice.
‘And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’
‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”’ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’
‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”’ Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’
Of course, this is a famous example of an idiot who can't communicate. (Or, indeed, subtract 1 from 365.) Words mean what they mean by common agreement; your wish to use one inappropriately will not make that use appropriate.
> If I said there are five myriads of sand grains in an hourglass, what could this possibly mean but 50 thousand?
That you're given to poetic turns of phrase? That you're confused about how to refer to numbers in English? If I actually encountered this phrase, I'd lean heavily toward option one there. It would be much like saying the glass contained five times as many grains as the stars in the sky, instead of as many.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myriad
Now apologize.
By inspection, there are exactly zero such examples in the first 200 COCA hits for "myriad", of which there are about 4000 total.
There are 72 total hits for "myriads", of which exactly one is arguably using the sense of 10,000, but it is a translation of the foreign phrase 八百万の神, where 万 is literally 10,000. I don't know whether the number in the Japanese phrase is meant to be interpreted literally, but I doubt it. Even here, the translation given is "myriads of gods", not "eight hundred myriads of gods".
You don't seem to understand what linguistic prescriptivism means. Everyone agrees that there are rules determining what is and isn't valid in a language. Descriptivism is the approach of determining the rules from usage. Prescriptivism is the approach of postulating an authoritative source.
Descriptively, "myriad" cannot be used to indicate the quantity 10,000 in English, only to indicate a large but vague number.
If you were trying to refer to India, you missed. They are estimated to have less than half the English-speaking population the US does. (And a negligible number of first-language speakers.)
1 crore = 1,00,00,000 (written with accepted formatting). Which is 10'000'000 (formatted) - 10 million - for the rest of the world. Anyone used to the Western formatting will quickly get cockeyed seeing those numbers at a glance. I'd imagine it is just as jarring for the Indians seeing Western formats.
You don't just switch to a different system mid way.
Utterly hopeless.
I mean, the US screwed up their fluid ounce / weight ounce so that a US fluid oz of water doesn't quite weight a US oz, but the UK redefined a hundredweight as 112 lbs to make it an even number of stones, and even though they kept their ounces correct, they redefined a pint to 20 ounces so now there's nowhere in the world a pint's a pound.
was 20 years ago in our student bar. More like 3-4 pounds for a pint now, 5 in London
Nor do I spend much time around freezing or boiling water. Fahrenheit has 9/5th more specificity.
Is the point that it's different than the rest of the world? I can see that point, but am I missing anything particularly bad about the Fahrenheit scale?
Mainly that it doesn't make any sense. Why was 32F made the magical number for the freezing point of water? The "well known" temperatures like freezing/boiling points of water are based on observations after the scale was invented. The secrets to the F scale died with Fahrenheit and today nobody knows for sure what 0F actually means.
50F -> 10C
51F -> ~10.5C
52F -> ~11C
I've a particular hatred of Fahrenheit :)
(And if that doesn't help for long, they can stimulate the economy further by changing the driving side to the right one.)
Actually, I'm Indian, and we have our steering wheel on the right side, just like the Brits. It's one of the less fortunate things we picked up from them.
If you're pointing out the inconsistency of the UK using metric units for i.e. weight and then not for travel distances, I agree, its a bit of a schism.
For the record, in the UK, and indeed most metric / english-speaking countries, it'll be metres (and kilometres).
A metre is the ISO unit for distance.
A meter is a device to measure things (not just distances).
Speeds are measured in miles per hour. This can be seen when driving a car, and also on road signage.
It's basically a mix. Yards are not really used outside really by people, but you will find feet and inches being used (alongside metres and centimetres) often in commercial settings.
Other examples of finding both things in the wild in use by people and companies in the UK: pints and litres. pounds and kilograms
Some units are imperial
People's height in Feet
People's weight in Stones+Pounds
Beer in Pints (proper pints, not american tiny-pints)
Roads in Miles
Temperature in C
Milk in Litres
Petrol in litres, but we also use miles/gallon
Food in grams from shops, but oz when buying steak at a pub
Bottles and Cans in ml
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/fresh-food/milk-b...
18 of the first 24 are in litres.