Cognition of Numbers in Languages

Disclaimer: I do not claim that this is an original idea. This pattern perhaps must have been explored at some point in time in the past. As far as I am concerned, this is a self-made observation.

Note: I hold the Creative commons copyright for this blogpost.


I know at least thirty people (All of them Indians) who have this problem. (I am counting myself in this thirty.) The problem is being able to read numerals. Someone who did his / her schooling in the English medium finds it difficult to read the numbers in Hindi/Marathi and vice-versa. Here I explore why...

This is a subtle yet important difference in cognition of numbers in English and in Indian languages (Hindi / Marathi particularly). The difference may look very small but it is where lies the root of the problem I mentioned. I am sticking to two-digit numbers only since that is where the confusion generally lies.

Read this number in Hindi:

८१


I would be happy if you read it as 'Ekyaasi' (Why happy? Because that is what it is supposed to read as. :-) )

Now read this in English ofcourse:


81
This is read as 'Eighty-one'.

Here's the difference, when you read 'Ekyaasi', your brain involuntarily reads 'Ek' (one - which is in the units place) first and then 'assi' (eight - in the tens place).

On the contrary, when you read 'Eighty-one', your brain identifies the 'eight' (of eighty - tens place) first and then one (units place).

So, if you are used to reading numbers in English, you will read the number intuitively from left-to-right (81 is 8 and 1 i.e. Eighty one). If you are used to reading numbers in Hindi, you will read it from right-to-left (81 is 1 and 8 i.e. ek-assi i.e. ekyaasi)


This left-to-right or right-to-left habit somewhere gets 'hard-wired' in our brain that we find it difficult to use an inverted technique to read numbers. Small habits can cause tiny problems, can't they?!

Are all adjectives opinionated?

A second standard English teacher must right now be telling her class, "An adjective is a word that describes a noun. There are four types of..." and she goes on.

'Sentiment Analysis' (as an earlier post of mine says) is a computer technique (a very layman way of calling it, actually) which tries to predict whether a sentence has a good opinion of something or bad. 

So, my question is, do adjectives describe, just as the English teachers of our country say? Or are adjectives opinionated?

When I say the film is good or bad, the adjectives 'good' or 'bad' are more opinionated than descriptive. What about 'the film is long'? Is 'long' an opinion or a description?

Intriguing. A description always tries hard not to be an opinion. When I describe something I don't like, more often than not, I will be projecting the negative side of that thing. So, a description at  the end becomes an opinion.

So, on the word level, it is very difficult to distinguish whether an adjective is opinionated or merely descriptive.