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A PODCAST ABOUT LANGUAGE
BY HELEN ZALTZMAN

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The Allusionist

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Allusionist 140. Num8er5

August 30, 2021 The Allusionist
A140 numbers logo.jpeg

We use verbal numbers and we use numerals - why do we need both? Why do we have the ones we have? What happened to Roman numerals? And what's loserish about the fiftieth Super Bowl?

Stephen Chrisomalis, professor of anthropology and linguistics and author of the book Reckonings: Numerals, Cognition and History, returns to the Allusionist to explain our current numbers, and why we shouldn't get too arrogant about them.

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In episodes Tags words, language, linguistics, education, comedy, entertainment, society & culture, arts, literature, etymology, lexicon, vocabulary, history, Stephen Chrisomalis, numbers, numerals, numbering, verbal numbers, numerical, number systems, alphabet, alphabetic numerals, capitals, upper case, Arabic numerals, Roman numerals, Ancient Greeks, Ancient Romans, globalisation, imperialism, colonisation, acrophonic, graphic, googol, pi, K, Super Bowl, loser, hats, gastrolith, mathematics, maths, math
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The Allusionist by Helen Zaltzman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.