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NUMBER: THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

If there is a universal human language, it's the language of numbers. So intuitive and uniform is the idea of numbers, that it is easy to learn and understand them even when spoken in another language. In fact, in most foreign language classes, the 'number words' are some of the first things you learn.

The following table goes over the important word components used to form number words in English, but also in 13 additional languages , including Latin, Greek, Japanese, Hebrew, Spanish, French, German, and many more!

There is also a bonus language not shown on this chart, but there is a link that will take you to it after the chart.

Please note that Greek does not use the standard English alphabet, but rather the Greek alphabet which only contains 24 letters. Some of these letters are analogous to English letters, but others have no counterpart. The Greek number words here are the result of translating Greek letters to approximate English letters based on phonetics (the way the Greek letters are pronounced ). This same approach ( called 'transliteration' ) has been used on the Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Swahili , Sanskrit, and Thai languages.

The following two tables display all the word components you would need to count to a thousand in no less than 14 different languages. These will come in handy later as you will see, for naming large numbers. Here's the first 7 languages:

Here is an additional 7 languages:

There is also urdu which is very unusual. I would have listed it with the other languages, but the construction for the first 100 counting numbers is irregular and doesn't follow the constructions above. If your interested you can learn about urdu numbers at this link ... Urdu numbers .

Now that I have given a sampling of the notations and naming conventions used for numbers throughout the world and through history, I would like to present my own unique naming convention.

The next article explains the impetus for this construction. Basically it provides short names for the first 1000 or so counting numbers !