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I noticed that South Asians often write 10,00,000 instead of 1,000,000. My questions are:

  1. What is the origin of this special numbering system? Was there a more practical reason for having a special numbering system for South Asia?
  2. Why hasn't modern South Asia reformed this redundancy, just using "millions" everywhere? Most other aspects of numbers seem to be completely coherent. There is no special numbering system for Spanish-speaking countries. Nor, there is a special numbering system for the People's Republic of China, Korea and Japan.

A good example is the the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" became "Kaun Banega Crorepati" in India.

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Arunabh Bhattacharya
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    "Nor, there is a special numbering system for China and Japan." While thousand separators have been more widely used recently due to the development of financial and computing industries, China certainly have its own traditional numbering system (10000 based) that is still widely used and in terms of language it is the only valid grammatical one. – xngtng Jan 21 '22 at 14:29
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    Actually, there is some conflict between use of "billion" and related words in US, UK, versus France, etc. Same words, but off by a factor of 1000. – paul garrett Jan 25 '22 at 20:03
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    I was surprised to see that Myanmar also uses the word 'lakh' to donate 100,000 like South Asians. Not sure if they actually used this term historically or introduced by British-India. – smarisetti Feb 12 '23 at 05:00

1 Answers1

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What is the origin of this special numbering system? Was there a more practical reason for having a special numbering system for South Asia?

The use of the terms "lakhs" and "crores" in South Asia (or the Indian subcontinent more precisely) finds its origin from the Vedic age (c. 1500 – c. 500 BCE) - the terms are derived from Sanskrit words लक्ष (laksha) and कोटि (koti) respectively. (If you are comfortable reading Hindi you may check out Yuddha Kand of Ramayana where the use of कोटि for crore can be found.) There is no particular reason for adopting this system, it's just a matter of convention.

Why hasn't modern South Asia reformed this redundancy, just using "millions" everywhere? Most other aspects of numbers seem to be completely coherent. There is no special numbering system for Spanish-speaking countries. Nor, there is a special numbering system for the People's Republic of China, Korea and Japan.

Modern Indian Subcontinent has not "reformed this redundancy" because there is no redundancy. People have always used lakhs and crores and continue to do so. However, having said so, Sri Lanka has switched to the English numbering system in recent years.

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