[Corpora-List] Primitives, semantic and otherwise

[Oliver Mason]

On 19 January 2011 01:46, John F. Sowa <sowa at bestweb.net> wrote:
> On 1/18/2011 7:13 PM, amsler at cs.utexas.edu wrote:
>
> Number words are very stable, because any misunderstanding
> can cause a tangible loss.
>

Even these can change; in 1974 the UK adopted the 'American billion'
("short-scale") so that it then went out of line with the rest of
Europe which pretty much uses the "long scale".

Short scale: 1 billion = 10^9
Long scale: 1 billion = 10^12

(see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales)

I can imagine that this is a source of endless confusion and
frustration in EU budget meetings...

Oliver

-- 
Dr Oliver Mason
Technical Director of the Centre for Corpus Research
Head of Postgraduate Studies (Doctoral Research)
School of English, Drama, and ACS
The University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT

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