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From: rwt@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Rainer Thonnes)
Subject: Re: New IEC proposal: 1 kibibyte = 1024 bytes
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Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 14:31:16 GMT
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In article <5b4q8v$m8u@news.tuwien.ac.at>,
sfroehli@et.tuwien.ac.at (Stefan Froehlich) writes:
> Bob Goudreau (goudreau@dg-rtp.dg.com) wrote:
> > ...what do you say in German when *speaking* about a non-integral
> > number?  For example, in English, most people would read "47.251" as
> > "forty-seven point two five one".  In German, would you say "Komma",
> > or "Dezimalkomma", or something else entirely?
> 
> Officially, we should say "forty-seven comma two five one".

Indeed.  Always Komma, never Dezimalkomma, in fact even outside the
context of reading a decimal number out loud, I don't remember ever
having come across the word Dezimalkomma.

> However, most people
> would read it as "forty-seven comma twohundred fifty-one" (this is
> especially true with two digits behind the comma).

I'm not sure *most* people would say it that way for 3 digits, nor
even for 2 digits *unless* those two digits represented common units,
in which case they would replace the "Komma" with the name of the unit.
Examples:  The sum of money 4,23DM would be "Vier Mark dreiundzwanzig", 
the length 1,78m would be "ein Meter achtundsiebzig".  That's because
of the implied (but omitted) words denoting the sub-units (Pfenning and
Zentimeter).  -  Although SI is encouraging the use of powers of a
thousand, the centimeter is the preferred unit by normal people in
everyday life, they would not tend to use millimetres much, and indeed
when measuring, say, the width of an item of furniture more exactly than
in terms of whole centimetres, they would be inclined to say "92,5cm"
rather than "925mm".

Mind you, I haven't lived in Germany now for over 20 years, habits may
have changed.

It could well be that the familiarity with use of quantities of money
and lengths spills over to other quantities, but nevertheless I suppose
that a school physics teacher would discourage pupils from reading the
weight of some object (0.25g) as "null Komma fuenfundzwanzig Gramm", but
would prefer "null Komma zwei fuenf Gramm", not only because it's better
practice, but also because centigrammes are not common units.

It strikes me that the origin of the decimal comma may well have been
the writing down of amounts of money, length, etc, in terms of major
units followed by minor units, listing them, as it were, with the use
of the serial comma even in two-item lists, and then gradually beginning
to omit the minor units.

I note that certain electronic components are or were coded in a way in
which the decimal point is omitted and replaced by the unit designator.
So a 37 Ohm resistor might be designated 37R, a 3.7 Ohm one 3R7, a 2700
Ohm one 2K7, etc, and similarly for capacitors and inductors.
