Or language extinction or whatever your preferred term. Is it a good thing? Does it help us work towards instating a universal language? Should we have a universal language? Is death of an obscure language inevitable? How much resources should go towards preserving a given language? What can we get out of preserving a language?
It doesn't look like we had this thread, and I figure it's worth talking about. Especially since I might end up dealing with it in my career years from now.
They should know what a myriad is, though. (From the word for 1 000.)
ERROR: The current state of the world is unacceptable. Save anyway? YES/NOWe have dyad, triad, tetrad, pentad, etc. for groups of things that reach certain numbers (2, 3, 4 and 5 respectively for the aforementioned examples). I curiously can't find any such word for a group of twenty, though. Does anyone know? Or does it not exist in the first place?
A group of twenty things/objects/people/etc. is a "score".
Myriad is 10,000. The ancient Greek number for 1,000 is khilioi, from which was derived the kilo prefix (the initial metric prefixes used Latin roots for submultiples and Greek ones for multiples).
And that comes into English as a "chiliad" (a group of 1,000 things).
Edited by Wyldchyld on Aug 19th 2023 at 11:09:33 AM
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.huh I figured "Myriad Truths" was just a weird translation, but now I think it might be understating the amount here
(Context: the JP name more accurlay translates to "million truths"note and is a reference to Izanagi's counter to Izanagi's vow to kill a certain amount of people daily)
Granted I also though Myriad was just a synonym for "countless" as opposed to being the term for 10000, (but then again that might not be mutually exclusive)
Edited by MorningStar1337 on Aug 19th 2023 at 7:21:59 AM
Ah, I was off by a factor of ten. Sorry!
ERROR: The current state of the world is unacceptable. Save anyway? YES/NOGranted I also though Myriad was just a synonym for "countless" as opposed to being the term for 10000, (but then again that might not be mutually exclusive)
It is. It means both. You will find that a lot of first-language English speakers don't know that it means "10,000" because they've learned it solely in the context of "countless". I've seen "chiliad" used for "countless", too, but it's a less well-known word in general than "myriad". "Million" and "Thousand" also get used to mean "countless" as well (as does "jillion", "zillion", and several other words, including "gillion", which is an alternative word to "milliard"). English uses loads of words for figures higher than a thousand to mean "countless".
Other words that are less well-known in general these days are words like "milliard" and "billiard". That's because of the difference in British long-scales counting and American short-scales counting (which kicks in at a million and higher). Both systems are Italian in origin (as are the ultimate origin of the names from a million and above, lower numbers tend to be Germanic in origin, such as "thousand").
Germanic countries adopted counting in groups of six and France adopted counting in groups of three (but confusingly used the Italian words for counting in groups of six). It's that French mix of counting in groups of three but using names that mean multiples of a million that entered American English during the American Revolutionary War. Words like "milliard" entered British English from French due to the Franco-Prussian War. These days, business preference is causing short-scales to take over international counting to the point where I'm not sure British schools teach long-scales any more.
It's only when you look at long-scales that you can see the original meaning of the words:
| Number | Short-Scales | Long-Scales |
| 1,000 | Thousand | Thousand (Ten Hundreds) |
| 1,000,000 | Million | Million ("Ten Hundred Thousand" or "Thousand Thousand") |
| 1,000,000,000 | Billion | Milliard (Thousand Million) |
| 1,000,000,000,000 | Trillion | Billion (Two groups of Million) |
| 1,000,000,000,000,000 | Quadrillion | Billiard (Thousand Billion) |
| 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 | Quntillion | Trillion (Three groups of Million) |
And so on.
Edited by Wyldchyld on Aug 20th 2023 at 6:30:32 PM
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.Romance languages were also spoken in the Balkans, central Europe, and Britain for a surprisingly long time! However, as in north Africa, waves of invasions & migrations eventually swamped those Romance-speaking populations. And as with north Africa, the only written records we have are in classical Latin, which was still considered the only appropriate choice for inscriptions.
Yeah, seeing French people translate the English "trillion" by the French "trillion" is a pet peeve of mine. It’s not the same thing, you dimwits.
But then I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard the French "billion" outside of mathematics papers. Like
said "1000 milliards" is much more common.
Edited by Lyendith on Aug 23rd 2023 at 2:00:39 PM
Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis (SLHK), a Cantonese language advocacy group ceased working after National Security Police raided it over an essay submitted to a contest that was deemed a threat to the HK SAR government.
More efforts are done by Cantonese-speaking immigrants/residents in British Columbia to preserve it due to concerns after the HK-based language association was made to close.
I'd say it makes a huge difference which writing system. Greek and Cyrillic, for example, are alphabets much like ours, in which a written word ideally contains most of the information you need to pronounce it correctly. Using them is a fairly elementary preamble to learning the language.
An abjad such as Arabic or Hebrew, though, conveys only partial phonetic information—not only do you have to learn a word, you have to learn to infer a word (or the inflected form of a word) from its written consonants alone. Chinese writing, on the other hand—and the Japanese kanji borrowed from it—provides no direct phonetic information in itself*; learning it is nearly as intensive a task as learning the spoken language itself is.
* Yes, many letters include a radical that provides some phonetic clue to native Chinese readers, but a) that's pretty opaque to non-native learners in practice, and b) the phonetic clue is often obsolete because either pronunciations have changed, or because Japanese and other non-Chinese readers are using it.
Heh yeah, that keeps throwing me for a loop, and especially when I see several characters next to each other and am like "right are you in one phrase/word or not?" sometimes xd
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And that's not even to mention how the sound-element might have changed during the evolution of the character... or how in the case of Japanese for example Chinese words came over sometimes in waves, not one at a time.
x 3. It's even worse with Japanese (and I presume other languages that have historically used borrowed Chinese characters) in that characters don't have unique pronunciations like in Chinese. Most characters in Japanese have at least two, sometimes more and unless you've got furigana there's no indication of which you're supposed to use in any situation.
There's a reason Chinese characters are only used for decoration in Vietnam and Korea.
Ukrainian Red Cross
I can’t imagine what an earthquake it was when Vietnam suddenly switched to a Latin alphabet… Must have taken some getting used to. >.>
On another note, I stumbled upon a channel about Louisana French and Lousiana Creole, pretty interesting.
LF sounds like French with an English accent but otherwise I understand both it and the creole just fine.
I also imagine that the upper classes didn't like the idea that reading might become easy.
Ukrainian Red Cross

Icosad, however, has.
Well, it doesn't mean what you want it to mean (it's a highly technical chemistry term), but you can just say it with the meaning you want it to have and people will eventually figure it out, especially because nearly no one actually knows the chemistry term icosad.