
Base-4 fractions in Telugu - pavel_lishin
http://blog.plover.com/math/telugu.html
======
vorg
> the digits for 3 have either three horizonal strokes ౾ or three vertical
> strokes ౻, and the others similarly. I have an idea that the alternating
> vertical-horizontal system might have served as an error-detection mechanism

The Chinese Suzhou numerals use alternating 〡〢〣 and 一二三 but for a different
reason:

    
    
        "21" is written as "〢一" instead of "〢〡" which can be confused with "3" (〣)
    

from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzhou_numerals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzhou_numerals)

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eponeponepon
Telugu's a spectacular language - it's ancient, it's spoken by tens of
millions of people, it has its own cinema industry and an enormous literary
corpus reaching back to before English even existed... and yet almost nobody
outside the subcontinent even knows it exists.

~~~
btbytes
Same with Tamil, Kannada, Bengali, Malayalam etc.,

~~~
gressquel
Tamil is a classical language like greek, hebrew, chinese etc. Its much older
than telugu and the other Indian languages. Malayalam and kanada is derived
from tamil

~~~
swatkat
Malayalam diverged from Tamil. But, Kannada is not a derivative of tamil.

~~~
psankar
Of course Kannada evolved from ancient Tamil. If you know both the languages,
you can easily find root words for most current day Kannada words in ancient
Tamil sangam poetry (like ooru=>oor referring to town, kaaveri=>kaaviri, etc.)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dravidian_languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dravidian_languages)

Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam all have higher degrees of impact due to Sanskrit
but they are all dravidian languages, derived from ancient Tamil.

~~~
panglott
Your Wikipedia link disagrees that all of the Dravidian languages are derived
from ancient Tamil. It describes them as common descendents of Proto-
Dravidian. It cites the attested literature of Tamil as being 2,000 years old.

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netvarun
Off-topic: The plover.com domain caught my eye. He is the author of 'Higher
Order Perl'[1][2], which is to this date, one of my most favorite programming
language books I've read and my first (and imho, best) introduction to
functional programming. The book is free to download!

[1] [http://hop.perl.plover.com/](http://hop.perl.plover.com/) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-
Order_Perl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-Order_Perl)

~~~
mjd
Thank you both for your kind words!

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nagVenkat
As someone who speaks Telugu as their first language, I am ashamed to admit I
don't know how to write numbers in Telugu, let alone the fractions. Though I
had learnt how to read and write Telugu, even in school, one is never taught
how to write numerals in Telugu. But I am glad people are still working on it.
It's an amazing language where most of the words end in vowles and I feel it
doesn't get enough interest from the Telugu community.

~~~
naravara
As a native speaker, taking a class is mind-blowing. Sadly I had to move out
of town after 3 classes, but I had no idea how sophisticated and well
structured the formal language was. The colloquial form we speak at home
doesn't do it any justice.

~~~
redditmigrant
>The colloquial form we speak at home doesn't do it any justice.

In a certain sense the spoken form of a language is its true form. The written
form are rules that get frozen at an artificially defined moment in time, but
the spoken language keeps evolving. Another way to look at this is that
writing systems are a relatively new phenomena for humans. In terms of time
scale, if you consider that spoken language has been around for 24 hours,
writing has only existed since about 11ish pm.

~~~
pavanky
The written form is also heavily sanskritized. The spoken form of Telugu is
closer to other south Indian Languages.

------
jacobolus
There are several changes I’d make to the number system if I could. Chief
among them:

(1) Try to mostly use a positional system in speech as well as writing. This
saves a lot of time because "three five nine" is a lot easier to say than
"three hundred fifty-nine", removes a huge amount of confusing irregularity,
and overall makes life much nicer for children just learning. While we’re at
it, scrap percentages.

(2) Allow signed digits, and give the negative versions their own unambiguous
names. It’s amazingly convenient to be able to have a way to directly express
e.g. 200 – 3 without needing to call it 197. Students should learn to convert
between an all-positive-digit form of a number and a round-via-truncation form
of the number, and generally use the latter in most practical circumstances.

For more on this point see
[http://ethw.org/Ancient_Computers](http://ethw.org/Ancient_Computers)

(3) – a pipe dream – general use of base twelve, and in particular use of
binary logarithms (“doublings”, “bits”, “octaves”) written using duodecimal
fractions.

Using alternate bases can be nice, and binary divisions are a lot more useful
than division by 5 – especially for e.g. measuring circular arcs where binary
divisions are much easier to compute because they only require square roots
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_scaling#Binary_angles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_scaling#Binary_angles)
– but these Telugu symbols are too complicated to write for a base 4 system to
use for general numeration. If we want divisions by two, hexadecimal (with
appropriately redesigned glyphs) is better.

~~~
ggambetta
"Three five nine" is easier to say than "three hundred and fifty-nine", but
the second option lets me have an order-of-magnitude number from the start.
Take "one seven nine five four two zero eight three". Are you keeping track of
how many digits you're hearing? "one hundred seventy nine million, <...don't
need to pay attention to the rest...>".

But you did say "mostly". Are you thinking "one seven nine million, five four
two thousands, zero eight three" or something like that?

~~~
jacobolus
If it were up to me, all the digit names would be one syllable, and the order
of magnitude would get its own syllable (or a few, for very large/small
numbers) up front. Basically a verbalization of scientific notation, but with
the exponent leading.

This could be safely dropped for numbers of less than a few digits. "Two six"
or "eight one four" is not going to be ambiguous/confusing.

~~~
akira2501
So, more or less: Japanese.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals)

~~~
jacobolus
No, not at all like Japanese. You’d have a single indication of the order of
magnitude of the largest digit, up front, followed by a string of positional
digits, where you just say the syllable for 0–9 for each place, including
zeros.

The Japanese version is basically like other languages (including English),
just with slightly fewer special-cased names.

~~~
akira2501
Oh.. wouldn't things like 1,000,001 be harder to say, then?

~~~
jacobolus
Yes, instead of “one million and one” (5 syllables) it would be 8 syllables
(or maybe 9).

On the other hand, 1,762,354 would be the same 8 syllables compared to 18
syllables in the current system (in English).

It’s possible some shortcuts could be added for several zeros in a row if that
ever became useful. Or if the speaker were willing to break it up into the sum
of two numbers this number could be expressed using 2 syllables for the 1e6
part, then the word “plus”, and another 1 syllable for the 1 part, so 4
syllables overall.

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lifthrasiir
This reminds me of the only Unicode character (as of 10.0) which numeral value
is _negative_ : U+0F33 TIBETAN DIGIT HALF ZERO has a value of -1/2\. Andrew
West has written an interesting article [1] about this and other "half"
Tibetan numerals.

[1] [https://babelstone.blogspot.com/2007/04/numbers-that-dont-
ad...](https://babelstone.blogspot.com/2007/04/numbers-that-dont-add-up-
tibetan-half.html)

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fractalb
Trivia: The first dictionary in Telugu which is still in use is written by an
Englishman by name Charles P. Brown.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Phillip_Brown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Phillip_Brown)

~~~
7171u
Another one.

First Malayalam-English( another south Indian Language) dictionary was
compiled by a German linguist Hermann Gundert who is the grandfather of German
novelist and Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Gundert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Gundert)

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wiineeth
Shocked to see my language mentioned here

