Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Latin has a few more sets of numbers than the usual ordinals and cardinals, including a full set of adverbial numbers, e.g. "semel, bis, ter, quater,..." whereas English has "once, twice, thrice" but this caps out at 3, and rumor has it the word "thrice" is frowned upon. There are several other constructs, such as generalizing "a pair of lawyers handled each case" to arbitrarily sized groups, with "vīcēnī" functioning in English as "a 20 of lawyers handled each case"

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_numerals for additional forms of Latin numbers.




The main encounter I've had with these is for modem/communication standards: V.32bis (14.4 kbit/s) and V.42bis data compression. Didn't know there was also usage of ter[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ITU-T_V-series_recomme...




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: