Kaixo!
On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 10:13:41AM -0400, Delirium wrote:
"Thousand million" sounds a bit odd though.
If I saw "thousand
million", I would expect to see a footnote explaining why this odd
choice of wording was used instead of "billion",
Because a billion is not a thousand million but a thousand thousand
million maybe :-)
The US English usage of "billion" and "trillion" is archaic (the same
holds for most of the measuring units used in the USA); of all the
languages I know all use the modern meanings of billion and trillion,
that is, 1,000,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 respectively.
Now I came accostumed to it, but when I first read things like
"a billion dollar" I was shocked to read about a so huge amount of
money; well, it was actually a thousand times smaller amount than it
was written; now I know that US newpapers always grossly exagerate
ands that big amounts have to be shrinked a thousand times to have
the real amount :-)
--
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga
http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
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