Re: AUGD: 200K visitors on a UG site? Only from a nation of 1.3 billion...
Re: AUGD: 200K visitors on a UG site? Only from a nation of 1.3 billion...
- Subject: Re: AUGD: 200K visitors on a UG site? Only from a nation of 1.3 billion...
- From: David Feng <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2007 10:13:11 +0800
20K or 200K?
In China, we count up like this: 1, 10, 100, 1000... just like the
West... and then we have the "Myriad" or "Wan", which is 10,000.
Given my new car costed me 32 Wan Chinese yuan, that would be 32 x
10,000 = 320,000 yuan.
This "Wan" is the source of about a million and "wan" (this was too
good; I actually meant a million and one) misinterpretations. The
Chinese do not have their own figure for a million -- they simply say
a "hundred wan", or 100 x 10,000, which works out to 1,000,000. We
then have a "yi", which is 100 million. Hence, we never say we have
1.3 "yi" people -- we have 13 "yi", which is 13 "hundred million" =
1.3 billion.
(Please feel free to take a walk around the block at this time! This
"wan" thing has plagued me since the day my Swissair flight touched
down at Beijing Airport on August 25, 2000!)
My new car gobbled up 32 "wan" yuan, which would mean 32 "ten
thousand" yuan or 32 x 10,000 = 320,000 yuan. That works out to be
320K, not 32K.
In the same vein, I announced the news that we've broken 200,000 to
the group last day as "we broke 20 'wan'", which worked for them. (I
was in the spell, by the way, because both figures were 6-digit
figures.) However, I failed to change the "wan"-ness of the whole
thing and posted "20K" when I meant "20 'wan'" or actually "200K".
By the way, this "wan" business is not unique to Greater China. Japan
has the "man" which is exactly the same as the "wan". The Korean
peninsula, too, has the "man" -- which is the same as the Japanese
version. We just pronounce them differently.
So I actually meant "200K visitors on a UG site", not merely "20K
visitors"... sorry about that...
Maybe I should introduce the "wan" unit to the rest of the globe...
and introduce the million to the Chinese... ;-)
David Feng
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