> 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)
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.
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
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
Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam all have higher degrees of impact due to Sanskrit but they are all dravidian languages, derived from ancient Tamil.
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.
The Tamil language currently used is not same as the one when the other Dravidian languages separated, So calling other languages 'derived' from the Tamil is not correct. All Dravidian languages have same root, so calling it 'Dravidian Language' and Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam & Telugu etc. derived from that language is more accurate and avoids the confusion
"Tamil is the eldest" is not a propaganda but the truth. A truth that is actively buried by the central Government of India, by spreading propaganda that Sanskrit is the oldest language and by doing things like stopping funds for excavation projects like Keezhadi to hide the truth, etc. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/keezhadi-ex...
My comment was about the presence of culturally rich languages in India, including Tamil. You and the original commenters have made this about Tamil's antiquity. Why the low self-esteem and victim complex? This is not forum/thread for that discussion..
Disclaimer: A Tamilian but doesn't know to read or write it (lived in the northern states)
I didn't know that it came before Telugu or neither about the fact that Malayalam or Kannada is derived from it. So yeah, it was a new information for me.
> an enormous literary corpus reaching back to before English even existed
Certainly true of Telegu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. But because Bengali is, like English, an Indo-European language, not true of it. Also, not sure what you mean by "etc".
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!
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.
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.
>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.
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.
(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 – 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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Chinese Suzhou numerals use alternating 〡〢〣 and 一二三 but for a different reason:
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzhou_numerals