It does distinguish Chinese. It's quicker to count to 10 in Chinese than in most other languages.
Malcolm Gladwell did some good research ('Outliers' is a great book) in this area.
Chinese are generally better at math than other ethnicities precisely because of their language.
Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. Read them out loud to yourself. Now look away, and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.
Gladwell points out that the English speakers have about 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly, but the Chinese are almost certain to get it right every time. He explains, "Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two second span. "And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4,8,5,3,9,7,6—right every time because—unlike English speakers—their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds," Gladwell adds.
Well if we're just speculating here, I'll add that since Chinese is tonal, Chinese speakers will remember the tune of sequence, not just a list of values. It's easier to remember a melody than a phone number.
Even non-tonal languages have melodies, for example English people use a lot of intonation compared for to my native Polish. When I was in UK everybody sounded like they were talking to infants or dogs :)
Another useful mnemonic that for me works even better than melody is rhythm. I noticed that I have about 20-notes buffer for last-heard rhythmic phrase even if I wasn't paying attention at the time. So for example after I ran down a flight of stairs I can count them by remembering the rhythm of my steps and adding them. My friend who has way better short term memory than me can't do this, but he can see the image he was looking at recently. Now that's cheating :)
> Even non-tonal languages have melodies, for example English people use a lot of intonation compared for to my native Polish. When I was in UK everybody sounded like they were talking to infants or dogs
It might just be more obvious since the English patterns are unfamiliar.
One of the more surreal experiences I've had was watching an English-language news broadcast in China. The presenter was speaking English and had obviously put in a lot of effort trying to learn what natural English sounded like. The general pattern of intonation over her sentences was quite realistic for English.
What made it surreal was that the intonation didn't match the words. Everything she said, it was like she was using the intonation pattern of some other sentence and applying it to a completely different sentence.
Polish has a lot of intonation—which is also kind of unique. I can instantly recognize people speaking Polish, even in larger groups of people talking all kind of languages, just by the very typical sentence melody that sticks out.
But it's indeed quite different to other languages, even the other Slavic ones.
Germanic intonation and sentence melody (for example like in German or English) is completely distinct from the Polish one. And this melody seems to be something sticky as you can always recognize Polish people just by their intonation even when they speak otherwise perfect German or English. That's not the case for for example Russian, or Czech, or Slovak people.
In Arabic, numbers from 1-10 are waaHid, ithnayn, thalaatha, arba:a, khamsa, sitta, sab:a, thamaaniya, tis:a, and :ashara. No monosyllabic numbers, and 8 has four syllables. And even these are short compared to the numbers in Inuktitut.
Interestingly, in Algerian Arabic, while other numbers are similar, two is different. It's zouj (one syllable). Except when counting e.g. twenty two, where it is similar to ithnayn (more like t'nin)
BTW, it's similar to German in that regard, because it's two-twenty.
Also interestingly, the way 8 sounds in Algerian Arabic would be 2 syllables. Although take it with a grain of salt because it's third-hand information. I learned this from my father, who's not native (but has lived in Algeria in his childhood)
This is kind of a tangent, but I understand that the native title of the Arabian Nights is 'alf layla wa layla, the book of "a thousand nights and a night".
What is the "one" night in that title? Any chance wa is related to waaHid?
No, wa (usually in basic sentences) means 'and'. Layla alone means one night. Alf is a thousand, and for certain numbers the singular is used over the plural, which is why it may seem confusing.
