To be precise, in China there were two variants of chūsū, manshin (万進) and (万万進) manmanshin, the latter had intervals of 10 8. In this system, the values for consecutive kanji where 10 4 apart. Later, yet another system, called chūsū (中数,ちゅうすう,”middle arithmetic”) came into use. The next value chō became oku oku (億億) = 10 16, kei = chō chō (兆兆) =10 32 and so on. In this system, the character after man got the value of man man (万万), so oku = man man = 10 8. 200 BCE), a separate counting system called jōsū(上数,じょうすう,”upper arithmetic”)also became used. This was very long ago, more than two thousand years, and clearly it was not entirely satisfactory because already from the Han dynasty onwards (i.e. So in this system, oku was ten times man, chō was ten times oku, etc. started to be used for this, in a counting system called kasū (下数,かすう, “lower arithmetic”). Then over time the characters oku, chō, kei etc. Actual counting of numbers beyond one myriad was ten myriads, hundred myriads, thousand myriads. Very long ago, the characters beyond man simply indicated degrees of large, so oku (億) was larger than man (万), chō (兆) was larger than oku, kei (京) was larger than chō, etc. The traditional numeral systems of China, Korea, and Japan are all decimal-based but grouped into ten thousands, also known as myriads ( man, 万), rather than thousands. Japan has adopted kanji from China – the word kanji (漢字) means Chinese characters, the 漢 character meaning “Han”. It started with the emergence of a number of different counting systems. The story of how these kanji came to represent such large numbers is quite interesting. The 京コンピュータ前駅 (K Computer Mae Station) in Kobe. Incidentally, it is probably the only supercomputer that has its own railway station, 京コンピュータ前駅. For that meaning it is pronounced “kei”, and this is the origin of the name of the famous Riken supercomputer in Kobe, the “K computer”: it is a computer capable of 10 petaflops, so 10 16 or kei flops. Kanji for large numbers with readings and number values Kanji and the supercomputerįor example, the character 京, which is the “kyō” in Kyoto (京都) means “metropolis”, but also 10 16. I was intrigued to notice that for some kanji, one of their meanings is a very large number: Kanji As a slow learner of Japanese, I often have to look up kanji (Chinese characters) in my dictionary.
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