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.
You think that’s bad? Half the folks in this 2,500 mile radius are “laughing in their crores and lakhs”. Mildly infuriating for someone not used to arbitrary multiple names.
Well, sort of. It's a sometimes-1000-but-usually-100 based system. That's a significant conflict with the standard English assumption of a 1000-based system (which appears in the metric system as the widespread use of kilounits, megaunits, milliunits...).
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:
[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.]
It was also true in most of the English speaking world except for the US until relatively recently - some people still talk about "american billions" and "english billions" (the last being 10^12)
Being 10-based is already a big win (and it isn't harmful to say "10-based" as long as people know what it means). You need to only remember the name <-> power of 10 mapping, and the conversion amounts to adding or removing zeros. Beats having to multiply in your head by arbitrary, hard to remember fractional values.
Have you ever tried converting from one system to the other in your head? It basically can't be done. Conversion is an easy process if you're willing to use pencil and paper, but at that point you're most of the way to using arbitrary conversion factors.
I sometimes do between long and short scales (English uses one, Polish uses the other one). So to convert from Polish "bilion" to English, you go "bilion" -> 10^12 -> "trillion". Or, in the rarer case, "sextillion" -> 10^21 = 10^3 * 10^18 -> "tysiąc trylionów". Adding or subtracting the exponent of 10 is much easier than multiplying by random numbers (e.g. 5280 to get from miles to feet).
If you expand your definition of English to include the largest English-speaking population in the world, the existence of the Indian system leads to a nice property:
It should be noted that though "myriad" comes from a Greek word for 10,000, and this is why the term "myriadic" is used to describe a number system based on powers of 10,000, the word itself is common in English with no meaning other than "a lot", and can't be interpreted to mean 10,000.
‘I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that seems to be done right—though I haven’t time to look it over thoroughly just now—and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents—’
‘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.
Nothing to apologize for. Try finding an example of sense 1. The dictionary you want to cite doesn't provide one.
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 expand your definition of English to include the largest English-speaking population in the world
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.)
They're different, and that is annoying, but it's hard to say exactly which is better or worse than any other. Indian seems to be the most useful, if you don't mind having a couple more words.
It's a 10 based system after the first 1'000. Hardly a "redeeming" feature considering numbers are always read/parsed right to left (Arabic) and given the first three digits separated for the thousands, the mind is already "trained" for the expected regular expression to parse. Booby trapped!
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.
In the UK, yards are used almost exclusively for exit distance markers. I don't recall ever hearing/seeing them used for anything else in my entire life.
I guess the rules nowadays use metric, but many
parts of football fields originally were in yards/feet, and occasionally are still described that way (6-yard box, 18-yard box)
Indeed, you said "Distances longer than a few kilometers are measured in miles", which made it sound almost like someone starts a journey in km and then once it gets past say 10km switches to miles.
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.
"Distances longer than a few kilometers are measured in miles" was a direct reference to the OP's "yards to measure distances shorter than a few kilometers".
Exactly. And that's why the UK is especially stupid with units. At least in the US they are consistently idiotic with Fahrenheit and Miles and BTUs and so on. In the UK, they understand what a kilogram is, but measure weight in stones anyway. Fucking stones! And then this thing with yards and miles.
I don't see anything idiotic about Fahrenheit. With distances I can see why powers of ten make a difference, but we don't vary temperatures by orders of magnitude in regular life.
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?
> 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.
I wonder if they're keeping fixing this as a backup plan for a rainy day? Say one day UK's GDP goes down harder than they'd like, so in order to burn some money and boost it back without making it look obvious, they'll announce the country has made up its mind, and is switching to full and proper metric starting next year. Cue the economy going to overdrive, as everything and the kitchen sink has to be relabeled or replaced...
(And if that doesn't help for long, they can stimulate the economy further by changing the driving side to the right one.)
It’ll go the other way: the next time they need to leave something, they can have a referendum to leave the metric system, then go through a few governments to get it done.
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.
UK went a little crazy sometime after the American colonies split.
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.
For the actual record, in the UK distances are measured in miles. This can be seen on road signage.
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
People's height in Feet
People's weight in Stones+Pounds
Beer in Pints (proper pints, not american tiny-pints)
Roads in Miles
Others are metric
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
Road distances on signs do tend to be yards rather than metres. Areas are often in acres, or square metres.
Milk is in pints. Some are sold in litres because you get less but it kind of looks the same: 1L < 2 pints. But people generally talk about milk in pints.
The supermarket branded milk that everyone actually buys is always in pints though. All of this filtered, UHT, skimmed business falls into the "things that aren't plain old milk" category
