17千?!
Anyone who’s done business in China has found themselves in the awkward position of missing a zero. I mean, all of a sudden you write out the number and realize something is a tenth the cost you thought it was, or maybe 10x more. (Or is it just me? I confess this has happened more than once, usually on odd items of labor that are so much cheaper in China than the US.)
If you’re reading this blog you probably know the reason, but briefly, for non-Chinese speakers: the issue is that Chinese groups big numbers by four zeroes while English does it by three. So 1.5 million in Chinese is something more like 150 ten-thousand. Or look at it as 150,0000 rather than 1,500,000. Sounds easy enough to deal with, but once you throw in unfamiliar costs and currency exchanges, it gets messy in a hurry.
As far as I know, though, no one deals with it by trying to use Chinese in an English way. I’ve never heard of someone saying or writing 17 thousand (十七千, shíqī qiān). It just doesn’t work. Maybe like in English trying to say 17 ten-thousand doesn’t work for 170,000.
So imagine how excited I was to find, in another of my daughter’s math problems, an instance of 17千 (yes, cold spring days can get a little dull here at the Sinoglot round table). Naturally, I called her over to share the discovery:
“So do you really say 17千 here? You don’t say 一万七千?” [i.e. asking if they don’t say it the normal way: “one ten-thousand, seven thousand”]
“Daaaaddy,” she said with the full eye roll. “It’s 17‘千克’, not 一万七千‘克’。”
Yes, it’s true. In my haste I hadn’t even read the problem. I’d immediately been drawn to the number and mis-parsed the word for kilogram, which is 千克, literally “thousand gram.”
For the record, here’s the problem:
一箱苹果连箱重17千克，吃了一半苹果后，连箱还重9千克，原来苹果中多少千克？箱子重多少千克？
A box of apples has a total weight of 17kg. After eating half the apples, the weight is 9kg. What’s the original weight of the apples? Of the box?
Oh well. It would be interesting to discover that some version of Chinese uses thousands like that, maybe parallel to English use of “twenty-two hundred” for 2,200, but I’m probably a lot more likely to discover just my own parsing errors.
I’ve always found it interesting that manuscript lengths are given in 千字, a non-SI unit that I guess you’d have to parse as “kilocharacters.”
Maybe that awkwardness explains why a lot of people use 公斤 instead of 千克. Same for 千米 vs 公里.
If you want to hear 十七千 or 兩百千, take a trip down to Southeast Asia sometime.
Google yields lots of examples: try searching 十千 百千 site:.my or site:.sg. Hong Kong sites also have some instances of 十千, too.
Ah, 公斤. I took my dog to the vet and as is usual got him weighed. The scale read out kilograms. My friend saw the number (4.5kg) and said “Oh, he’s 9 斤.”
All scales I’ve seen do kg, and in each case the speaker immediately doubles the number. Why not just say the number on the scale and change the unit?
I’d say it makes it easier for us Americans who use pounds, except that I’ve spent enough time abroad that I’ve just adopted the metric system so “pounds” is pretty meaningless now.
@jdmartinsen: very cool example. It’s not a term I have occasion to use, but I may try to slip it in somewhere. It would be cool to have a recorded example to listen to the stress, which I’d think for something like “17千字” would be “shiqi QIANzi” rather than “shiqi qian ZI”. Does that seem right?
@GAC: Thanks for bringing up 公斤. I think part of my confusion in the first place is that I’d never think of using 千克. In my mind the normal word for kilogram is 公斤. It’d be interesting if 千克 works awkwardly for native speakers, but I’m guessing it doesn’t because (1) JDM has a more “native” example of the usage and (2) as I mentioned above, I think the stress patterns are different in speech, so that they probably don’t sound awkward. Still, it seems possible…
@Ahkow: this is fascinating. The few examples I looked at seem to be pretty casual. Do people say this in speaking too? Do you know if it’s confined to some particular group of speakers?
@SYZ, JDMARTINSEN: 千字 seems to appear on the publication information page in every novel I’ve bought in the PRC. Does this come from how authors are paid?
I thought I was off by a factor of 10 the first time I finished a novella, and then realized the character count was in 千 not 万. It certainly makes it seem more impressive, and adds a significant figure.
@Kaiwen – Same observation here.
What is very interesting is the fact that every single book I have seen here indicates the number of characters in the last page. It must be some kind of official regulation, I guess.
I find it very funny because it is like selling literature by the kilo. Hey, this book has 20 kilowords and you wrote 21kilowords on the back, give me back my money!!!
Not surprising that so many people use the copy+paste method to increase volume, and not surprising that modern Chinese literature has so many problems to develop.
DO you imagine Oscar Wilde putting a comma in the morning and taking it out in the evening? He would be starving by now, such a poor output of kilowords!