Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2000 08:44:46 -0500 (EST)
From: Allan Wechsler <awechsle*bbn.com>
Subject: Re: Number names

    [...]

There is not really any formal written justification.  We designed our
presentation by email, going through dozens of iterations and ironing
out difficulties.

The resulting system is in two parts: the part up to the 999th
zillion, and the extension to all zillions.

The part up to the 999th zillion was designed to be a seamless
extension of the attested (Chuquet?) system, which seems to end at
the 20th zillion.  We followed printed sources with one exception: the
sources give `septemdecillion' as the 17th zillion, when in fact the
Latin for 17 is `septendecem', with assimilation changing md to nd.

Latin rules for naming tens and hundreds were followed scrupulously.
The decision to combine the components in the order units, tens,
hundreds was arrived at after some agonization; the Romans used `et'
to combine components, but we preferred `septemvigintillion' to
`viginti-et-septillion' for esthetic reasons.  We spent quite a bit of
time getting the Latin assimilation (`liaison') rules correct, and
have confidence that a classicist would find little fault with our
choices (including the revisionist `septendecillion', which we regard
as the correction of a linguistic error).

The presentation in _The Book of Numbers_ was designed to leave the
impression that the system up to 999 was pre-existing, although in
fact we invented a lot of it; you will note that Conway carefully
never says the system is ancient.

The rest of the system (starting at the 1000th zillion) was more
frankly artificial, and went through several revisions.  I do feel
that we `got it right' in the end; earlier revisions were more
linguistically charming, but also more cumbersome.

Perhaps Prof. Conway will have a different perspective on the process;
I'm taking the liberty of forwarding this explanation to a
mailing-list that I believe he reads.

-A