Japanese has 2 series of words for numbers: words borrowed from Chinese many centuries ago (Sino-Japanese numbers); and native Japanese numbers Table 1 shows the numbers from 1 to 10, as well as the words for zero, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100 million, 1012 and 1016. For comparison, I have included the pronunciations of the numbers…… Continue reading Numbers in Japanese and Chinese
Tag: Classifier
Some World Atlases about languages
I’ve recently discovered 2 useful atlases, each devoted to a specific feature of languages: the World Atlas of Transitivity Pairs (WATP) the World Atlas of Classifier Languages (WACL) They provide more detail than is found in more general databases, such as the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (WALS), which I’ve mentioned in some other posts…… Continue reading Some World Atlases about languages
Mainland Southeast Asian languages
Mainland Southeast Asia is home to speakers of around 280 languages spread across 5 families: the Mon-Khmer branch of Austroasiatic (including Vietnamese and Khmer) Sino-Tibetan (including Mandarin and other Sinitic languages, and Burmese and other Tibeto-Burman languages) Tai-Kadai (including Thai and Lao) Hmong-Mien (languages of southwest China) Austronesian (languages spoken mainly in Oceania, but represented…… Continue reading Mainland Southeast Asian languages