keithl wrote:Million, billion, milliard, short scale, long scale ... feh. Use scientific notation, with e/E separating the exponent so we don't need to use superscripts. Not as difficult as lakh ( 1e5 or 100,000 ) and crore ( 1e7 or 100,00,000 ) common in India and south Asia; and yes, they do write the commas in crore like that. So 1e18 = 1 lakh lakh crore crore .
There's also the Chinese (and Chinese-derived) version that counts by myriads rather than thousands. In Japanese:
ichi (1), juu (10), hyaku (100), sen (1000), man (10,000=10^4), juu man (100,000), hyaku man (1,000,000), sen man (10,000,000), oku (100,000,000=10^8), ..., chou (1,000,000,000,000=10^12 ... a short-scale trillion; we line up every 12th power since we go by 3's and they go by 4's), ..., kei (10,000,000,000,000,000=10^16), ..., gai (100,000,000,000,000,000,000=10^20), ...
Simpler than that lakh and crore thing, but still different. So, yes, scientific notation FTW.
keithl wrote:For extra compactness, sing the exponent on top of the significand, but make sure both talker and listener have perfect pitch.
And languages that are tonal to begin with will have to do some sort of throat-singing/overtone-singing.