I'm kinda wondering are there any countries that still use the long scale nowadays? For me the biggest thing I've had to learn is that in Russian we use a short scale, except we don't have "billion" and instead it's "milliard". So it's just that you need to be careful with translating that one word. Are there other countries where the scale "shifts"?
Germany and France do. It can be a PITA when dealing with English texts... But then again when dealing with things in an international context you'll also encounter Chinese and Indian systems for large numbers.
Chinese:
1 yi
10 shi
100 bai
1000 qian
10000 wan
10 x 10000 shi wan (hundred thousand)
100 x 10000 bai wan (one million)
1000 x 10000 qian wan (ten million)
1 x 100.000.000 yì (hundred million)
10 x 100.000.000 shi yi (one billion)
Indian: no idea how it works in practice but it involves crore and lakh...
> Indian: no idea how it works in practice but it involves crore and lakh...
They write thousands just like in the U.S. system, with the same commas: 20,000. But beyond that, the "lakh" is 100k, the "crore" is 10M, and commas in written figures go in twos:
The population of Australia is about 2.8 crores: 2,80,00,000. The Delhi metro area is over 3.4 crores: 3,40,00,000.
They have more unique words for every 100-multiple unit after crore, to go along with the commas, but in everyday practice they don't use those terms. Instead, they go "long" on the crores. Thus, India's population is about 146 crores; the new Mumbai underground Colaba-Bandra-SEEPZ line will cost ₹21,000 crore.
When reporting foreign money, they use the U.S. system with millions and billions as usual: ₹21,000 crore is parenthesized (US$2.5 billion).
But more and more people use "billions" (not billardo, which is our own term for it). The same people that say "diez kas" (for 10k) instead of "diez mil" like they're saving words for doing that (hint: no).
>The same people that say "diez kas" (for 10k) instead of "diez mil" like they're saving words for doing that (hint: no).
I sometimes say (in Portuguese) "dez kapa".
It's just slang. Language changes a lot faster than you realise, and a lot of words that are "normal" to you would illicit the same response before you were born.
Yep it's a mess. Most newspapers and official channels just avoid the word billion altogether, just writing "mil milhões" (a thousand million).
AFAIK the exception is the finance world, where I believe B stands for the short scale for a long time, and $1B has been used in newspapers for a long time too due to globalisation of the economy.
Isn’t “mil milhões” the proper term in the long scale? “Bilião” would be equivalent to the short-scale trillion, e.g., “NVidia vale $4 biliões”, which is equivalent to “NVidia is worth $4 trillion”.
Same in Turkey. We say Milliard instead of Billion. In my childhood I can swear it was like Million->Milliard->Trillion->Trilliard. They were in daily language because 1 Million Turkish Lira was like a few dollars. At some point they decided Trilliard does not exist and it became something like a Mandela Effect for me. We never used Billion though.
