Mike Ayers wrote:
> I discovered this weekend that Chinese, despite grouping large
> numbers by ten thousands [...], write their digits with comma
> separators every 3 digits [...]
This may be different in different operating systems, but I too was
convinced that they grouped four digits at a time.
> I am aware that there are European languages (swiss and
> italian?) that group four digits, and am reasonably sure
> that japanese does.
Check the date of your information: was it written on April 1st!?
I am 101% sure that this is not true for Italy, and 99% sure that it not
true even for Switzerland (so, on average, I'm 100% sure that it was an
April fool:-)
English, Italian, French and German share the same syntax for numbers >= 100
(i.e. we all use the units hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, etc.),
so that would be absurd.
> Before I go on a wild web search, does anyone know if
> there already
> exists a collection of information on the numbering systems of various
> languages, including the natural language ordering of the
> numbers, the digit
> grouping size, and the digit group separator character?
> Since this is for
> informational purposes, I don't need code, just examples.
IBM has a web pages to show the contents of their locale information; have
you checked that?
_ Marco
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:15 EDT