Who knew? But that article indicates America has used the short scale (base ten) forever and the UK has used it since 1974, so let's just assume that FT (an English language paper) is not worried about confusion regarding the meaning of 'billion' and there's a different norm at work here.
> the UK has used it since 1974, so let's just assume that FT (an English language paper) is not worried about confusion
Anyone aged around 60 or older would have been learning these numbers before 1974, and that's a significant overlap with FT's audience. You are dismissing this as if it's Middle English. It's an entirely reasonable explanation, at least one that shouldn't be dismissed.
And there was a transition period where younger people need to know that the term could be ambiguous. It's not like they burned all the maths texts in 1974 and replaced them with newer literature. Older text books were probably in use into the 80s and perhaps the 90s.
From the writing of the era, it's clear this new definition for million was not popular, and many chose to continue using the "British meaning." So it was probably in colloquial use for quite a while, and the transitional term "1 thousand million" became the proper style.
>let's just assume that FT (an English language paper) is not worried about confusion
The FT has a big international audience. As a German reader where a "Billion" is still 10^12 it does sometimes trip me up a little. So I at least find it useful.
That's a decent point, but what I don't get is, when I do a Google Translate from English to German for "billion," I get "Milliarde." Is the concern that German readers, reading the article in translation to German, will be confused? It would seem like the German readers reading the English article would understand.
Not trying to argue any point (I mean honestly...), just trying to understand the German POV here, which is interesting.
You may not be aware that it's a false friend. The German word Billion exists, and it means trillion.
So the German reader will read the English article (in English, not auto-translated), see the word billion, think “oh that looks familiar” and might assume it means the same as the German word Billion.
Machine translation makes quite a few mistakes, so I think if you have some decent knowledge of a language, you might be better off reading the original rather than a machine translation. At least my point of view from a couple of years ago. But it's also possible that machine translation has gotten WAY better in the last couple of years, I'm not sure.
