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For someone like me who wants to know about how numbers are written in Mandarin Chinese, the information about how they are represented in Unicode is really irrelevant. Could the statements like "such-and-such was an error which was corrected in the next version of the standard" be separated out into a different section? How numbers are represented in a language and how that language then is represented in a computerized form are two different subjects - related enough to be in the same article, yes, but not mixed together, I think. Evan Donovan 03:11, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
The translations for numbers such as 1,200 can be both yi qian liang bai (一千兩百) or yi qian er bai (一千二百). Although this is addressed in the article, too many veriations exist in various dialects as to render the simple rules stated rather inadaquate. Maybe the way to do this is to remove all instances of 2 in the examples of forming Chinese numbers except in the instances where we are illustrating the liang (兩) versus er (二) idea? -- Sjschen 19:13, 9 December 2005 (UTC)
Though the name HangZhou numerals implies they originate from HangZhou, China, these numerals are not used in HangZhou anymore. I asked a 30 year old lady who grew up in HangZhou, she had not seen these numerals in her life. Her mother recognizes what they are. However, she had not seen them in use during her 40 years in Hangzhou. She remembered seeing these numerals in Malaysia over 50 years ago.
Several of my friends from Taiwan, who are in the 40s, had not seen these numerals ever.
On the other hand, the Chinese herbal doctor I used in San Jose, CA wrote me a herbal prescription using these Hangzhou numerals. It is evident that these numerals are still in use in some Cantonese communities in the US. But with just a small sample, it is hard to determine how extinct it has become.
Kowloonese 11:05, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I have removed the question that asks whether the system for writing Suzhou numerals in Hong Kong is the same. It is indeed the same. I've also added a vertical example.
I remember that the digits 6–8 also gets rotated when a string of such digits are written. But I don't have my math textbook from primary school any more :-( Can anyone check? - Gniw 05:09, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
According to Unicode standard zhao means trillion in Japan and Taiwan, it means a million in China. It also means trillion in Hong Kong. --Anon2
About those big numbers, I found something a little bit different. The second one among those three ancient systems should be close, but different from, the modern way.
《數術記遺》(東漢徐岳) :「黃帝為法,數有十等,及其用也,乃有三焉,十等者, 億、兆、京、垓、秭、穰、溝、澗、正、載。三等者,謂上中下也。其下數者,十十變 之,若言十萬為億,十億為兆,十兆為京。中數者、萬萬變之,若言萬萬為億、萬萬億 為兆、萬萬兆為京。上數者數窮則變,若言萬萬曰億,億億曰兆,兆兆曰京也。下數淺 短,計事則不盡,上數宏廓,世不可用,故其傳業惟以中數耳。」 [1] [2]
So technically, it goes up like 10^8, 10^16, 10^24, 10^32, 10^40, 10^48 etc. -- Liuyao 01:52, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)
You are right. Recently, I have also noticed that there exist two conflicting sources, one saying that "萬萬為億、萬萬億為兆、萬萬兆為京", the other saying that "萬萬為億、萬億為兆、萬兆為京", which is the modern way. I am going to include the other ancient way in the main text. By the way, welcome to Wikipedia. You may be interested in the Wikipedia:China-related topics notice board. -- Felix Wan 10:08, 2004 Nov 21 (UTC)
Aren't hao2 and li2 reverse? --Anon3
I reverted a change regarding the Su Zhou numeral 9.
Many web browsers are displaying the wrong glyph for this character, hence what you are looking at on this page may be wrong, don't trust the display.
The bottom line is that all the above are not the same though they all look similar. When the browsers show the wrong glyph, it just make these characters more confusing.
Kowloonese 03:21, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)
From the article (emphasis mine):
I wonder what language you are refering to? 114 in Mandarin Chinese is universally spoken as yi1 bai3 shi2 si4. As a speaker of Chinese, I find the allegation that it should be read as yi1 bai3 yi1 shi2 si4 quite strange, as I have never heard yi1 shi2, ever. This is because shi2 is grammatically not considered a measure word, where as higher units are. Therefore you always say yi1 bai3, but never just bai3. The exception to this is the use of er2 rather than liang3 with bai3 and higher, reflecting their shared status as numerals. liang3 bai3 is said, but it's sort of slang. One would never write it. But shi2 is different; it is never preceded by yi1.
Someone ought to change this information, because it's wrong. --Anon
We say "yi1bai3-yi1shi2si4" not "yi1bai3-shi2si4". the latter one sounds weird. And in Cantonese, when saying 1XX, it's acceptable to omit the yi1, especial when it comes to 1X0 (except the case of 100). -- θαλαμηγός ( talk) 18:30, May 20, 2004 (UTC)
Oh, My! you Beijingese would say "yi1bai3-shi2si4"?? surprised to know that! i never say in that way when i am speaking in Mandarin. i always say "yi1bai3-yi1shi2si4" in Mandarin. "yi1" is always not omitted when in the middle of the number. :O -- θαλαμηγός ( talk) 18:00, May 27, 2004 (UTC)
I'm totally confused. I consider myself as a native Beijing dialect speaker, and yibai<YI>shisi is definitely what we say in Beijing at least. I'm pretty sure that it is officialized in math textbook for elementary school that I used (in 1990s). To emphasize my point, we say yibai-YI-shisi, for sure, 100%. -Liuyao
Hi, I'm the original Anon poster that caused the confusion. I know this is quite late, but I'd like to retract what I said regarding the pronunciation of 114. Although I currently live in the PRC, I spent a great portion of my youth abroad, and I apparently inherited a somewhat grammatically incorrect speech style in this respect. Sorry about the confusion. *loses face*
That having been said, of course, omitting the yi1 in front of the shi2 is unfortunately quite common, which is one of the reasons that I was able to keep on saying in without anyone noticing. In particular, my Shanghainese coworkers (whose Mandarin I would not describe as standard by a long shot) seem to ommit the yi1 as well. At the time I confered with one of them (a graduate of Beijing People's University, no less) and she didn't seem to think that yishi was standard. But then she majored in History....
Anyway, sorry again. It was immature of me to be so insistant. We bilinguals are wacky -- we can't speak any language properly :)
// Ryan:
1) hehe, "1.3 billion Mandarin speakers" eh? Are you a real 幹部 or just an admirer? Seriously though, is this a real statistic or just another myth of Chinese supernationalism? I mean, no offence, but despite the fact that Mandarin is the official language, I am hard pressed to believe that even half of Mainlanders are fluent. I mean, back in the States we have a pretty good educational system, and a good deal of money, and I sometimes wonder what my fellow country-people are saying. I'm really curious about this, and I hope my snide remarks don't turn anyone off. Something about being in the crosshair of 700 missiles makes one a little sarcastic . . . 2)As a one year Taiwan resident, all I've ever heard here is "yi bai yi shi si," or more like "yi bai yi si si," but the folks here take pride in the accent and I take pride in having adopted it. Moreover, all this talk of "officialness" is really wasted thought; language can't be controlled like that. 3)And finally, with regard to traditional characters, I would be careful about so blithely predicting their downfall. Firstly, reunification is by no means guaranteed. Secondly, the dual existence of simplified and more formal, complicated characters has existed for much longer than the modern period, from what I can tell. In fact, many of the so called "simplified" characters are not new at all and many had been in popular use but not formalized. Finally, one cannot overlook the aesthetic element here. Many people, myself included, find simplified characters useful yet rather ugly. They're great for taking notes, but even some Mainland companies and websites I've seen prefer to use the traditional for thier logos. //
Some people might disagree with me, but I think that the notes section after the table (starts "Leading '1' can sometimes be...") would be easier to read if the Chinese was put in characters and pinyin with tone marks, e.g. 十shí, rather than the notation it is in now (shi2). At the moment it looks a little bit cramped and a little bit hard to follow.
I'm tempted to include the first point, so 一百一十四 rather than '1' '100' '1' '10' '4', but my opinion on that part is probably influenced by my small but sufficient-for-this knowledge of Chinese. Even so, I think 1-100-1-10-4 or something like that would work better (and if that doesn't help, a friendly reminder that the manual of style asks for double quotes to assist the search engine).
Or, maybe, it would work better to write the rules first and then provide several examples after that, rather than have one example for every rule. Thus
--Rule 1 --Rule 1 --Rule 2 Example 1 --Rule 3 rather than --Rule 2 --Examples Example 2 Example 1 --Rule 2 Example 2 Example 3 Example 3
On the other hand, maybe it just needs more white space. This is just a format thing though. I'll check back in a few days to see if anyone's said anything. Neonumbers 13:10, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I simplified the table, sacrificing a lot of the information in it which was either self-explanatory (e.g. 1012 is a trillion) or irrelevant (i.e. parts that aren't strictly about Chinese, e.g. myriad). I also tried to narrow the first three columns to make it look better (:-)) and more followable. I don't think I took anything too important out (some things I reworded and I moved one thing to a table footnote. Please don't move this back into the table; it's too long - if it must be somewhere else, put it somewhere apart from inside the table.) Neonumbers 13:16, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
There is one thing that bugs me about this article: Someone wrote a sentence saying it "shouldn't be considered a numeral system", yet is in the series "Numeral systems". Surely it must be one or the other. I don't know if the Chinese ever used these numbers as numerals or not, so I'm not going to make a claim as to whether it is or isn't - but surely, it can't be both a numeral system *and* not a numeral system. Right? Neonumbers 10:50, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
In Taiwan ham radio, we use the military names for 0,1,2,7,and sometimes 9. Add a table. Also I swear 釐米 is different than 公釐. Mention it. say if Arabic numbers were ever written backwards. -- User:Jidanni 2006-04-16
I've checked a few Japanese website (Unicode version):
[3]
[4]
and used excite translation:
[5]
discovered that "極" does not come from Buddhist texts. However, the sites do not explain the origin of "極" clearly.
Now, I ask everybody, is there any relevant information about "極"??
220.118.11.13
07:14, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
You may be misunderstood, "極" is indeed came from Buddhist texts.
QQ
13:39, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
HaHa.It's suposed to mean that if your teacher gives you a 0 he has to write 零.Because i don't see for what practical reason you'll prefer a much more complicated symbol.-- 87.64.17.127 01:19, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
This is simply because they do not know how to input the Chinese 〇 in computer and some old computer don't support this character, it is usually wrongly written as Arabic 0.-- 刻意(Kèyì) 11:50, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
Did the Chinese numeral system ever develop a concept of zero independently to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system? Or did they only get the concept of zero when they discovered the hindu-arabic system? Zachorious 10:49, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
Should this article also include tally numerals (i.e. the forms of the numbers 1-5 that use progressive strokes of 正)? Rod ( A. Smith) 20:55, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
I can't see why the list only includes cantonese but not other chinese dialects which have completely different pronunciation. Is this some sort of cantonese bigotry? Please add other dialects like shanghainese or sichuanese to the list in order to be comprehensive. -- Small potato 19:53, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
In the "large numerals" section, notice the comment:
Then try to see what that sentence refers to. In the table, there is no entry for "jí". The character (載) matches the one called "zài", but since it is the largest one in the table, there are no "numerals beyond" to which the sentence could be referring.
Can someone help work this out? Robert Munafo ( talk) 05:50, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
I think Suzhou numerals should have its own article. Chinese number gestures got its own article, so Suzhou numerals being more historically significant should get its own article. -- Voidvector ( talk) 18:53, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
This is original research and so can't be included in the article, but I couldn't help but point out that the Buddhist mathematicians who concluded that there were 1052 "grains of sand in the Ganges river" were so far off base that even with the craziest estimates of parameters they must have been lousy at arithmetic to think this was remotely plausible. In fact even if a grain of sand is only 10 microns across (which is more of a very fine silt than sand), 1052 such grains would weigh around 1034 kilograms, which is not only vastly larger than the mass of the entire Earth, it is more than a thousand times larger than the mass of the entire solar system. So like the Maya, they seem to have been OK at using a positional system to generate stupendously large numerals, but had little actual understanding of the size of these numbers in context.
By the way, can anyone explain why these large numbers go up by factors of 104? Based on Indian tradition (e.g. the lakh) I would have thought (or rather, wildly guessed) powers of 102 more likely in a Buddhist text. (I note, as pure speculation, that if someone has gotten this factor wrong and it is actually factors of 102, or in other words each of these large numbers has effectively been squared, then the "grains of sand in the Ganges river" number actually works out quite close to a reasonable estimate, so perhaps the ancient Buddhists weren't quite so bad at maths, just their translators were!)
Finally, what on earth can the "Ancient" Chinese have wanted with a prefix that meant 10-12? Not even the most foamy-mouthed nationalist can pretend that anyone prior to the twentieth century could measure anything with sufficient precision to make such a prefix meaningful. Which I guess leads one to wonder, how confident are we, and what references are there to support, the claim that in "Ancient" times it had precisely this meaning? I emphasise "precisely" -- after all, the SI prefixes "micro" and "nano" are Ancient Greek, but to the Ancient Greeks they just meant "small" and "dwarf", they didn't have precise metrological meanings. (And what is meant by "Ancient"? Normally in Chinese history, that means prior to the Qing, which began in 221 BCE. But the oldest known mathematical treatise in Chinese is the Suàn shù shū, which is no older than 202 BCE.) -- 203.20.101.203 ( talk) 05:35, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
Actually I think somebody was joking with this section haha. You'll have to know Chinese to notice, but the words for 1060 and above are silly. "那由他" sounds like a pun on "哪有他" which is a slang way of saying, "pffft, that doesn't exist". "不可思意" does means unimaginable, but in the sense like, "Did you know your neighbor is Brad Pitt?" "不可思意!(That's unimaginable!)" "无量" is like "无穷" which means infinity. And "大数" is just funny because 大 = big and 数 = number, so it's a literal term that I've never heard anybody use in China. The juxtaposition of "infinity" and then "big number" is the punch line because it calls to mind an image of young scholars sitting around, and having run out of legitimate ideas, decided to make crap up to screw with future generations. My guess is that this table was copied from an online joke off of a Chinese website. -- 174.34.144.211 ( talk) 03:35, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
Currently the article seems to be centred along describing the numerals based on how they are pronounced in Standard Mandarin (i.e. all figures have their readings given in Pinyin). If I were to create a new section regarding the pronounciation of Chinese numbers in other dialects, would I be met with support or opposition? If favourable, I can start on it. -- 李博杰 | — Talk contribs email 10:37, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
Taken from w:ja:漢数字. Apparently they are also used in aviation and railways within China, not only in the military. If someone can confirm its validity, that would be wonderful.
数 | 通常 | 軍隊 |
---|---|---|
0 | 〇 (líng) | 洞 (dòng) |
1 | 幺 (yāo) | 幺 (yāo) |
2 | 二 (èr) | 两 (liǎng) |
3 | 三 (sān) | 三 (sān) |
4 | 四 (sì) | 刀 (dāo) |
5 | 五 (wǔ) | 五 (wǔ) |
6 | 六 (liù) | 六 (liù) |
7 | 七 (qī) | 拐 (guǎi) |
8 | 八 (bā) | 八 (bā) |
9 | 九 (jiǔ) | 勾 (gōu) |
Regards, -- 李博杰 | — Talk contribs email 12:09, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
"The Chinese character system can be classified as part of the language, but it still counts as a number system." <- Could somebody elaborate on this claim? -- Frozenport ( talk) 07:22, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
I just want to comment that this is a marvelous article. I cannot imagine finding this wealth of detail anywhere else. The article could be expanded and published as a very nice little book, but it is so much easier and more practical to find it all right here in Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dratman ( talk • contribs) January 13, 2012
The Middle Kingdom: A Survey of The... Chinese Empire and Its ..., Volume 1 By Samuel Wells Williams
Rajmaan ( talk) 14:57, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
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This doesn't make sense. Just because the PRC uses 万亿 and 亿亿 instead of 兆 and 京 doesn't mean that we can accept them as Simplified forms, especially since some other countries using Simplified still use 兆 (such as Singapore). By that logic the entire Simplified row could be replaced with combinations of 万 and 亿 (I've seen 亿亿亿 used in a published work, for example). Moreover, the table compares four different systems that use the same ancient number names, and thus keeping the table as it was suggests that 万亿 could mean 10^6 and 亿亿 could mean 10^7, which is wrong. Rather, 万亿 and 亿亿 should be discussed as part of the note at the bottom of the table.
Considering that the table is in fact misleading as mentioned above, I've gone ahead and changed it with an added note. Arcorann ( talk) 11:52, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
I didn`t change back, but just to clarify that Singapore adopts the standards of the People’s Republic of China and uses simplified characters, that means Singapore uses 兆 for 10^6 rather than 10^12. UU ( talk) 11:33, 14 October 2018 (UTC)
This is my first time using the talk page, so apologies if I'm doing something wrong. I saw the article, and I wanted to say that in addition to the use of 万亿 in Taiwan, I've seen 百万 used quite frequently on the Mainland as an alternative to 兆 as well. 16tonweight ( talk) 23:31, 5 July 2020 (UTC)
I removed this template "cleanup lang|date=October 2023", because it claims that it is necessary to specify the "language" of the non-English content, but this is not true, because the content consists of characters, which do not have a "language", any more than Г or α does. Imaginatorium ( talk) 07:05, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
und-Hani
, which is the
ISO 639 code representing an unspecified language written in Han characters, or Han characters in and of themselves. I actually created the {{
hani}}
template to do this easily. Without further specification, as HTML documents all English Wikipedia articles are tagged as being wholly in English—for some reason, it rather bothers me that this is quite often not their declaration does not tell the whole truth about their contents.
Remsense
留
08:49, 12 December 2023 (UTC)The metric prefixes ronto and quecto are missing their respective Chinese character in the Republic of China (Taiwan) table for SI Prefixes. Uuruuseiyo ( talk) 20:13, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
The redirect
弐 has been listed at
redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the
redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at
Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 January 25 § 弐 until a consensus is reached.
Utopes (
talk /
cont)
09:20, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
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For someone like me who wants to know about how numbers are written in Mandarin Chinese, the information about how they are represented in Unicode is really irrelevant. Could the statements like "such-and-such was an error which was corrected in the next version of the standard" be separated out into a different section? How numbers are represented in a language and how that language then is represented in a computerized form are two different subjects - related enough to be in the same article, yes, but not mixed together, I think. Evan Donovan 03:11, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
The translations for numbers such as 1,200 can be both yi qian liang bai (一千兩百) or yi qian er bai (一千二百). Although this is addressed in the article, too many veriations exist in various dialects as to render the simple rules stated rather inadaquate. Maybe the way to do this is to remove all instances of 2 in the examples of forming Chinese numbers except in the instances where we are illustrating the liang (兩) versus er (二) idea? -- Sjschen 19:13, 9 December 2005 (UTC)
Though the name HangZhou numerals implies they originate from HangZhou, China, these numerals are not used in HangZhou anymore. I asked a 30 year old lady who grew up in HangZhou, she had not seen these numerals in her life. Her mother recognizes what they are. However, she had not seen them in use during her 40 years in Hangzhou. She remembered seeing these numerals in Malaysia over 50 years ago.
Several of my friends from Taiwan, who are in the 40s, had not seen these numerals ever.
On the other hand, the Chinese herbal doctor I used in San Jose, CA wrote me a herbal prescription using these Hangzhou numerals. It is evident that these numerals are still in use in some Cantonese communities in the US. But with just a small sample, it is hard to determine how extinct it has become.
Kowloonese 11:05, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I have removed the question that asks whether the system for writing Suzhou numerals in Hong Kong is the same. It is indeed the same. I've also added a vertical example.
I remember that the digits 6–8 also gets rotated when a string of such digits are written. But I don't have my math textbook from primary school any more :-( Can anyone check? - Gniw 05:09, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
According to Unicode standard zhao means trillion in Japan and Taiwan, it means a million in China. It also means trillion in Hong Kong. --Anon2
About those big numbers, I found something a little bit different. The second one among those three ancient systems should be close, but different from, the modern way.
《數術記遺》(東漢徐岳) :「黃帝為法,數有十等,及其用也,乃有三焉,十等者, 億、兆、京、垓、秭、穰、溝、澗、正、載。三等者,謂上中下也。其下數者,十十變 之,若言十萬為億,十億為兆,十兆為京。中數者、萬萬變之,若言萬萬為億、萬萬億 為兆、萬萬兆為京。上數者數窮則變,若言萬萬曰億,億億曰兆,兆兆曰京也。下數淺 短,計事則不盡,上數宏廓,世不可用,故其傳業惟以中數耳。」 [1] [2]
So technically, it goes up like 10^8, 10^16, 10^24, 10^32, 10^40, 10^48 etc. -- Liuyao 01:52, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)
You are right. Recently, I have also noticed that there exist two conflicting sources, one saying that "萬萬為億、萬萬億為兆、萬萬兆為京", the other saying that "萬萬為億、萬億為兆、萬兆為京", which is the modern way. I am going to include the other ancient way in the main text. By the way, welcome to Wikipedia. You may be interested in the Wikipedia:China-related topics notice board. -- Felix Wan 10:08, 2004 Nov 21 (UTC)
Aren't hao2 and li2 reverse? --Anon3
I reverted a change regarding the Su Zhou numeral 9.
Many web browsers are displaying the wrong glyph for this character, hence what you are looking at on this page may be wrong, don't trust the display.
The bottom line is that all the above are not the same though they all look similar. When the browsers show the wrong glyph, it just make these characters more confusing.
Kowloonese 03:21, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)
From the article (emphasis mine):
I wonder what language you are refering to? 114 in Mandarin Chinese is universally spoken as yi1 bai3 shi2 si4. As a speaker of Chinese, I find the allegation that it should be read as yi1 bai3 yi1 shi2 si4 quite strange, as I have never heard yi1 shi2, ever. This is because shi2 is grammatically not considered a measure word, where as higher units are. Therefore you always say yi1 bai3, but never just bai3. The exception to this is the use of er2 rather than liang3 with bai3 and higher, reflecting their shared status as numerals. liang3 bai3 is said, but it's sort of slang. One would never write it. But shi2 is different; it is never preceded by yi1.
Someone ought to change this information, because it's wrong. --Anon
We say "yi1bai3-yi1shi2si4" not "yi1bai3-shi2si4". the latter one sounds weird. And in Cantonese, when saying 1XX, it's acceptable to omit the yi1, especial when it comes to 1X0 (except the case of 100). -- θαλαμηγός ( talk) 18:30, May 20, 2004 (UTC)
Oh, My! you Beijingese would say "yi1bai3-shi2si4"?? surprised to know that! i never say in that way when i am speaking in Mandarin. i always say "yi1bai3-yi1shi2si4" in Mandarin. "yi1" is always not omitted when in the middle of the number. :O -- θαλαμηγός ( talk) 18:00, May 27, 2004 (UTC)
I'm totally confused. I consider myself as a native Beijing dialect speaker, and yibai<YI>shisi is definitely what we say in Beijing at least. I'm pretty sure that it is officialized in math textbook for elementary school that I used (in 1990s). To emphasize my point, we say yibai-YI-shisi, for sure, 100%. -Liuyao
Hi, I'm the original Anon poster that caused the confusion. I know this is quite late, but I'd like to retract what I said regarding the pronunciation of 114. Although I currently live in the PRC, I spent a great portion of my youth abroad, and I apparently inherited a somewhat grammatically incorrect speech style in this respect. Sorry about the confusion. *loses face*
That having been said, of course, omitting the yi1 in front of the shi2 is unfortunately quite common, which is one of the reasons that I was able to keep on saying in without anyone noticing. In particular, my Shanghainese coworkers (whose Mandarin I would not describe as standard by a long shot) seem to ommit the yi1 as well. At the time I confered with one of them (a graduate of Beijing People's University, no less) and she didn't seem to think that yishi was standard. But then she majored in History....
Anyway, sorry again. It was immature of me to be so insistant. We bilinguals are wacky -- we can't speak any language properly :)
// Ryan:
1) hehe, "1.3 billion Mandarin speakers" eh? Are you a real 幹部 or just an admirer? Seriously though, is this a real statistic or just another myth of Chinese supernationalism? I mean, no offence, but despite the fact that Mandarin is the official language, I am hard pressed to believe that even half of Mainlanders are fluent. I mean, back in the States we have a pretty good educational system, and a good deal of money, and I sometimes wonder what my fellow country-people are saying. I'm really curious about this, and I hope my snide remarks don't turn anyone off. Something about being in the crosshair of 700 missiles makes one a little sarcastic . . . 2)As a one year Taiwan resident, all I've ever heard here is "yi bai yi shi si," or more like "yi bai yi si si," but the folks here take pride in the accent and I take pride in having adopted it. Moreover, all this talk of "officialness" is really wasted thought; language can't be controlled like that. 3)And finally, with regard to traditional characters, I would be careful about so blithely predicting their downfall. Firstly, reunification is by no means guaranteed. Secondly, the dual existence of simplified and more formal, complicated characters has existed for much longer than the modern period, from what I can tell. In fact, many of the so called "simplified" characters are not new at all and many had been in popular use but not formalized. Finally, one cannot overlook the aesthetic element here. Many people, myself included, find simplified characters useful yet rather ugly. They're great for taking notes, but even some Mainland companies and websites I've seen prefer to use the traditional for thier logos. //
Some people might disagree with me, but I think that the notes section after the table (starts "Leading '1' can sometimes be...") would be easier to read if the Chinese was put in characters and pinyin with tone marks, e.g. 十shí, rather than the notation it is in now (shi2). At the moment it looks a little bit cramped and a little bit hard to follow.
I'm tempted to include the first point, so 一百一十四 rather than '1' '100' '1' '10' '4', but my opinion on that part is probably influenced by my small but sufficient-for-this knowledge of Chinese. Even so, I think 1-100-1-10-4 or something like that would work better (and if that doesn't help, a friendly reminder that the manual of style asks for double quotes to assist the search engine).
Or, maybe, it would work better to write the rules first and then provide several examples after that, rather than have one example for every rule. Thus
--Rule 1 --Rule 1 --Rule 2 Example 1 --Rule 3 rather than --Rule 2 --Examples Example 2 Example 1 --Rule 2 Example 2 Example 3 Example 3
On the other hand, maybe it just needs more white space. This is just a format thing though. I'll check back in a few days to see if anyone's said anything. Neonumbers 13:10, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I simplified the table, sacrificing a lot of the information in it which was either self-explanatory (e.g. 1012 is a trillion) or irrelevant (i.e. parts that aren't strictly about Chinese, e.g. myriad). I also tried to narrow the first three columns to make it look better (:-)) and more followable. I don't think I took anything too important out (some things I reworded and I moved one thing to a table footnote. Please don't move this back into the table; it's too long - if it must be somewhere else, put it somewhere apart from inside the table.) Neonumbers 13:16, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
There is one thing that bugs me about this article: Someone wrote a sentence saying it "shouldn't be considered a numeral system", yet is in the series "Numeral systems". Surely it must be one or the other. I don't know if the Chinese ever used these numbers as numerals or not, so I'm not going to make a claim as to whether it is or isn't - but surely, it can't be both a numeral system *and* not a numeral system. Right? Neonumbers 10:50, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
In Taiwan ham radio, we use the military names for 0,1,2,7,and sometimes 9. Add a table. Also I swear 釐米 is different than 公釐. Mention it. say if Arabic numbers were ever written backwards. -- User:Jidanni 2006-04-16
I've checked a few Japanese website (Unicode version):
[3]
[4]
and used excite translation:
[5]
discovered that "極" does not come from Buddhist texts. However, the sites do not explain the origin of "極" clearly.
Now, I ask everybody, is there any relevant information about "極"??
220.118.11.13
07:14, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
You may be misunderstood, "極" is indeed came from Buddhist texts.
QQ
13:39, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
HaHa.It's suposed to mean that if your teacher gives you a 0 he has to write 零.Because i don't see for what practical reason you'll prefer a much more complicated symbol.-- 87.64.17.127 01:19, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
This is simply because they do not know how to input the Chinese 〇 in computer and some old computer don't support this character, it is usually wrongly written as Arabic 0.-- 刻意(Kèyì) 11:50, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
Did the Chinese numeral system ever develop a concept of zero independently to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system? Or did they only get the concept of zero when they discovered the hindu-arabic system? Zachorious 10:49, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
Should this article also include tally numerals (i.e. the forms of the numbers 1-5 that use progressive strokes of 正)? Rod ( A. Smith) 20:55, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
I can't see why the list only includes cantonese but not other chinese dialects which have completely different pronunciation. Is this some sort of cantonese bigotry? Please add other dialects like shanghainese or sichuanese to the list in order to be comprehensive. -- Small potato 19:53, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
In the "large numerals" section, notice the comment:
Then try to see what that sentence refers to. In the table, there is no entry for "jí". The character (載) matches the one called "zài", but since it is the largest one in the table, there are no "numerals beyond" to which the sentence could be referring.
Can someone help work this out? Robert Munafo ( talk) 05:50, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
I think Suzhou numerals should have its own article. Chinese number gestures got its own article, so Suzhou numerals being more historically significant should get its own article. -- Voidvector ( talk) 18:53, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
This is original research and so can't be included in the article, but I couldn't help but point out that the Buddhist mathematicians who concluded that there were 1052 "grains of sand in the Ganges river" were so far off base that even with the craziest estimates of parameters they must have been lousy at arithmetic to think this was remotely plausible. In fact even if a grain of sand is only 10 microns across (which is more of a very fine silt than sand), 1052 such grains would weigh around 1034 kilograms, which is not only vastly larger than the mass of the entire Earth, it is more than a thousand times larger than the mass of the entire solar system. So like the Maya, they seem to have been OK at using a positional system to generate stupendously large numerals, but had little actual understanding of the size of these numbers in context.
By the way, can anyone explain why these large numbers go up by factors of 104? Based on Indian tradition (e.g. the lakh) I would have thought (or rather, wildly guessed) powers of 102 more likely in a Buddhist text. (I note, as pure speculation, that if someone has gotten this factor wrong and it is actually factors of 102, or in other words each of these large numbers has effectively been squared, then the "grains of sand in the Ganges river" number actually works out quite close to a reasonable estimate, so perhaps the ancient Buddhists weren't quite so bad at maths, just their translators were!)
Finally, what on earth can the "Ancient" Chinese have wanted with a prefix that meant 10-12? Not even the most foamy-mouthed nationalist can pretend that anyone prior to the twentieth century could measure anything with sufficient precision to make such a prefix meaningful. Which I guess leads one to wonder, how confident are we, and what references are there to support, the claim that in "Ancient" times it had precisely this meaning? I emphasise "precisely" -- after all, the SI prefixes "micro" and "nano" are Ancient Greek, but to the Ancient Greeks they just meant "small" and "dwarf", they didn't have precise metrological meanings. (And what is meant by "Ancient"? Normally in Chinese history, that means prior to the Qing, which began in 221 BCE. But the oldest known mathematical treatise in Chinese is the Suàn shù shū, which is no older than 202 BCE.) -- 203.20.101.203 ( talk) 05:35, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
Actually I think somebody was joking with this section haha. You'll have to know Chinese to notice, but the words for 1060 and above are silly. "那由他" sounds like a pun on "哪有他" which is a slang way of saying, "pffft, that doesn't exist". "不可思意" does means unimaginable, but in the sense like, "Did you know your neighbor is Brad Pitt?" "不可思意!(That's unimaginable!)" "无量" is like "无穷" which means infinity. And "大数" is just funny because 大 = big and 数 = number, so it's a literal term that I've never heard anybody use in China. The juxtaposition of "infinity" and then "big number" is the punch line because it calls to mind an image of young scholars sitting around, and having run out of legitimate ideas, decided to make crap up to screw with future generations. My guess is that this table was copied from an online joke off of a Chinese website. -- 174.34.144.211 ( talk) 03:35, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
Currently the article seems to be centred along describing the numerals based on how they are pronounced in Standard Mandarin (i.e. all figures have their readings given in Pinyin). If I were to create a new section regarding the pronounciation of Chinese numbers in other dialects, would I be met with support or opposition? If favourable, I can start on it. -- 李博杰 | — Talk contribs email 10:37, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
Taken from w:ja:漢数字. Apparently they are also used in aviation and railways within China, not only in the military. If someone can confirm its validity, that would be wonderful.
数 | 通常 | 軍隊 |
---|---|---|
0 | 〇 (líng) | 洞 (dòng) |
1 | 幺 (yāo) | 幺 (yāo) |
2 | 二 (èr) | 两 (liǎng) |
3 | 三 (sān) | 三 (sān) |
4 | 四 (sì) | 刀 (dāo) |
5 | 五 (wǔ) | 五 (wǔ) |
6 | 六 (liù) | 六 (liù) |
7 | 七 (qī) | 拐 (guǎi) |
8 | 八 (bā) | 八 (bā) |
9 | 九 (jiǔ) | 勾 (gōu) |
Regards, -- 李博杰 | — Talk contribs email 12:09, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
"The Chinese character system can be classified as part of the language, but it still counts as a number system." <- Could somebody elaborate on this claim? -- Frozenport ( talk) 07:22, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
I just want to comment that this is a marvelous article. I cannot imagine finding this wealth of detail anywhere else. The article could be expanded and published as a very nice little book, but it is so much easier and more practical to find it all right here in Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dratman ( talk • contribs) January 13, 2012
The Middle Kingdom: A Survey of The... Chinese Empire and Its ..., Volume 1 By Samuel Wells Williams
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This doesn't make sense. Just because the PRC uses 万亿 and 亿亿 instead of 兆 and 京 doesn't mean that we can accept them as Simplified forms, especially since some other countries using Simplified still use 兆 (such as Singapore). By that logic the entire Simplified row could be replaced with combinations of 万 and 亿 (I've seen 亿亿亿 used in a published work, for example). Moreover, the table compares four different systems that use the same ancient number names, and thus keeping the table as it was suggests that 万亿 could mean 10^6 and 亿亿 could mean 10^7, which is wrong. Rather, 万亿 and 亿亿 should be discussed as part of the note at the bottom of the table.
Considering that the table is in fact misleading as mentioned above, I've gone ahead and changed it with an added note. Arcorann ( talk) 11:52, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
I didn`t change back, but just to clarify that Singapore adopts the standards of the People’s Republic of China and uses simplified characters, that means Singapore uses 兆 for 10^6 rather than 10^12. UU ( talk) 11:33, 14 October 2018 (UTC)
This is my first time using the talk page, so apologies if I'm doing something wrong. I saw the article, and I wanted to say that in addition to the use of 万亿 in Taiwan, I've seen 百万 used quite frequently on the Mainland as an alternative to 兆 as well. 16tonweight ( talk) 23:31, 5 July 2020 (UTC)
I removed this template "cleanup lang|date=October 2023", because it claims that it is necessary to specify the "language" of the non-English content, but this is not true, because the content consists of characters, which do not have a "language", any more than Г or α does. Imaginatorium ( talk) 07:05, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
und-Hani
, which is the
ISO 639 code representing an unspecified language written in Han characters, or Han characters in and of themselves. I actually created the {{
hani}}
template to do this easily. Without further specification, as HTML documents all English Wikipedia articles are tagged as being wholly in English—for some reason, it rather bothers me that this is quite often not their declaration does not tell the whole truth about their contents.
Remsense
留
08:49, 12 December 2023 (UTC)The metric prefixes ronto and quecto are missing their respective Chinese character in the Republic of China (Taiwan) table for SI Prefixes. Uuruuseiyo ( talk) 20:13, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
The redirect
弐 has been listed at
redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the
redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at
Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 January 25 § 弐 until a consensus is reached.
Utopes (
talk /
cont)
09:20, 25 January 2024 (UTC)