You think that’s bad? Half the folks in this 2,500 mile radius are “laughing in their crores and lakhs”. Mildly infuriating for someone not used to arbitrary multiple names.
Well, sort of. It's a sometimes-1000-but-usually-100 based system. That's a significant conflict with the standard English assumption of a 1000-based system (which appears in the metric system as the widespread use of kilounits, megaunits, milliunits...).
Chinese uses a 10,000-based ("myriadic") system. Conversion is a gigantic pain. Calling these all "10-based" is more harmful, likely to confuse people, than helpful.
You might consider the powers of ten that get their own unit in each system:
[I had to look up if the official definition of trillion is 10^18 or 10^24. It looks like a nice question to get a good irrelevant discussion for the coffeetime after lunch, if you can collect a few mathematicians in a Spanish speaking country.]
It was also true in most of the English speaking world except for the US until relatively recently - some people still talk about "american billions" and "english billions" (the last being 10^12)
Being 10-based is already a big win (and it isn't harmful to say "10-based" as long as people know what it means). You need to only remember the name <-> power of 10 mapping, and the conversion amounts to adding or removing zeros. Beats having to multiply in your head by arbitrary, hard to remember fractional values.
Have you ever tried converting from one system to the other in your head? It basically can't be done. Conversion is an easy process if you're willing to use pencil and paper, but at that point you're most of the way to using arbitrary conversion factors.
I sometimes do between long and short scales (English uses one, Polish uses the other one). So to convert from Polish "bilion" to English, you go "bilion" -> 10^12 -> "trillion". Or, in the rarer case, "sextillion" -> 10^21 = 10^3 * 10^18 -> "tysiąc trylionów". Adding or subtracting the exponent of 10 is much easier than multiplying by random numbers (e.g. 5280 to get from miles to feet).
If you expand your definition of English to include the largest English-speaking population in the world, the existence of the Indian system leads to a nice property:
It should be noted that though "myriad" comes from a Greek word for 10,000, and this is why the term "myriadic" is used to describe a number system based on powers of 10,000, the word itself is common in English with no meaning other than "a lot", and can't be interpreted to mean 10,000.
‘I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that seems to be done right—though I haven’t time to look it over thoroughly just now—and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents—’
‘Certainly,’ said Alice.
‘And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’
‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”’ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’
‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”’ Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’
Of course, this is a famous example of an idiot who can't communicate. (Or, indeed, subtract 1 from 365.) Words mean what they mean by common agreement; your wish to use one inappropriately will not make that use appropriate.
> If I said there are five myriads of sand grains in an hourglass, what could this possibly mean but 50 thousand?
That you're given to poetic turns of phrase? That you're confused about how to refer to numbers in English? If I actually encountered this phrase, I'd lean heavily toward option one there. It would be much like saying the glass contained five times as many grains as the stars in the sky, instead of as many.
Nothing to apologize for. Try finding an example of sense 1. The dictionary you want to cite doesn't provide one.
By inspection, there are exactly zero such examples in the first 200 COCA hits for "myriad", of which there are about 4000 total.
There are 72 total hits for "myriads", of which exactly one is arguably using the sense of 10,000, but it is a translation of the foreign phrase 八百万の神, where 万 is literally 10,000. I don't know whether the number in the Japanese phrase is meant to be interpreted literally, but I doubt it. Even here, the translation given is "myriads of gods", not "eight hundred myriads of gods".
You don't seem to understand what linguistic prescriptivism means. Everyone agrees that there are rules determining what is and isn't valid in a language. Descriptivism is the approach of determining the rules from usage. Prescriptivism is the approach of postulating an authoritative source.
Descriptively, "myriad" cannot be used to indicate the quantity 10,000 in English, only to indicate a large but vague number.
> If you expand your definition of English to include the largest English-speaking population in the world
If you were trying to refer to India, you missed. They are estimated to have less than half the English-speaking population the US does. (And a negligible number of first-language speakers.)
They're different, and that is annoying, but it's hard to say exactly which is better or worse than any other. Indian seems to be the most useful, if you don't mind having a couple more words.
It's a 10 based system after the first 1'000. Hardly a "redeeming" feature considering numbers are always read/parsed right to left (Arabic) and given the first three digits separated for the thousands, the mind is already "trained" for the expected regular expression to parse. Booby trapped!
1 crore = 1,00,00,000 (written with accepted formatting). Which is 10'000'000 (formatted) - 10 million - for the rest of the world. Anyone used to the Western formatting will quickly get cockeyed seeing those numbers at a glance. I'd imagine it is just as jarring for the Indians seeing Western formats.
