… I don’t hear the g in the regular version (at the beginning of the video).
I think it’s just an artifact from the autotuning.
Oh, I just noticed it in the subtitle. That’s most likely a typo.
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Ah okay, thank you for the explanation!
From Wikipedia’s Myriad § East Asia,
the traditional numeral systems of China, Korea, and Japan are all decimal-based but grouped into ten thousands rather than thousands. The character for myriad is 萬 in traditional script and 万 in simplified form in both mainland China and Japan. The pronunciation varies within China and abroad: wàn (Mandarin), wan⁵ (Hakka), bān (Minnan), maan⁶ (Canotonese), man (Japanese and Korean)
There’s a very regular structure to the construction of large numbers which is nearly the same across all the languages.
Lots of unnecessary detail
- Single-digit numbers are 一, 二, 三, 四, 五, 六, 七, 八, 九 (although Chinese replaces 二 with 兩 when used with most counters)
- Two-digit numbers are 十 (not 一十), 二十, 三十, 四十, etc. (although Cantonese has 十 廿 卅 卌) with the one’s digit appended.
- Three digit numbers are 一百 (Chinese) or 百 (Japanese and Korean), 兩百 (some dialects of Chinese) or 二百 (other Chinese, Japanese, and Korean), 三百, 四百, etc. with a two-digit number appended.
- Four digit numbers are 一千, 兩千/二千, 三百, 四百, etc. with a 3-digit number appended.
- 5-8 digit numbers are the top myriad + 萬/万 + the bottom myriad, e.g. 12,345,678 = 1234万5678 = 一千兩百三十四萬五千六百七十八 or 一千二百三十四万五千六百七十八.
- 9-12 digit numbers are the top myriad + 億 (traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) or 亿 (simplified Chinese) + the bottom 8 digits.
- 13-16 digits are the top myriad + 兆 + bottom 12 digits. 17-20 are top + 兆 + bottom. This pattern continues with 京, 垓, 秭, 穰, 溝/沟, 澗/涧, 正, 載, etc.
The only big difference I know about is that trailing multipliers can be implicit in Chinese. For example, 4500 is 四千五百 across all languages, but usually Chinese would say and write 四千五, dropping the trailing 百 as unnecessary. 四千五 would be understood as 4005 in Japanese and Korean; to express 4005 in Chinese, you’d have to say 四千零五 (four thousand zero five - the 0s only need to be said once). 四千五十 is 4050 though (no 零/zero necessary) because the final multiplier is still present.
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Curious. I’d expect 一千, 一千萬, 一億 with regard to actual numbers in Chinese, but you’d hear 千萬 when talking about the millions place digits, and 千/萬/etc. don’t have a leading 一 when they are used to mean “innumerably many”. I wonder how much the nuances vary in Japanese.
I sometimes see large numbers written with a mix of Arabic digits and Chinese grouping in the news, for example 熱中症：搬送者２万２６４７人…１６～２２日 消防庁 - 毎日新聞. Not sure how common that is overall.
Hehe, that’s a fun video. XD
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