I don't think "mi" is a prefix; it was just a bit of the word "million" which could be conveniently discarded to make way for prefixes...
I can never quite remember how "million" came about in the first place. Common sense suggests there must be a link with Latin "mille" = "thousand", but declines to suggest how it managed to square itself along the way :-)
Million comes from French (around the 14th century), which borrowed it from Italian, where it was formed from mille "1000" + -one (augmentative suffix) and used to mean a thousand thousands.
My COED says of billion: From French billion, purposely formed in the 16th century to denote the second power of a million (by substituting bi- (prefix) for the initial letters), trillion and quadrillion being similarly formed to denote the third and fourth powers. The name appears not to have been adopted in English before the end of the 17th century [first quote is from Locke 1690]. Subsequently the application of the word was changed by French arithmeticians, figures being divided in numeration into groups of threes, instead of sixes, so that French billion, trillion denoted not the second and third powers of a million, but a thousand millions and a thousand thousand millions. In the 19th century, the US adopted the French convention, but Britain retained the original and etymological use (to which France reverted in 1948). Since 1951 the US value, a thousand millions, has been increasingly used in Britain, especially in technical writing and, more recently, in journalism...
So, it was the French who came up with the "unetymological" meaning, a very long time ago. The Americans and British simply selected different options from an existing variation, rather like aluminium and herb and -ize etc.
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Date: 2004-02-25 09:03 am (UTC)I can never quite remember how "million" came about in the first place. Common sense suggests there must be a link with Latin "mille" = "thousand", but declines to suggest how it managed to square itself along the way :-)
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Date: 2004-02-25 09:44 am (UTC)My COED says of billion:
From French billion, purposely formed in the 16th century to denote the second power of a million (by substituting bi- (prefix) for the initial letters), trillion and quadrillion being similarly formed to denote the third and fourth powers. The name appears not to have been adopted in English before the end of the 17th century [first quote is from Locke 1690]. Subsequently the application of the word was changed by French arithmeticians, figures being divided in numeration into groups of threes, instead of sixes, so that French billion, trillion denoted not the second and third powers of a million, but a thousand millions and a thousand thousand millions. In the 19th century, the US adopted the French convention, but Britain retained the original and etymological use (to which France reverted in 1948). Since 1951 the US value, a thousand millions, has been increasingly used in Britain, especially in technical writing and, more recently, in journalism...
So, it was the French who came up with the "unetymological" meaning, a very long time ago. The Americans and British simply selected different options from an existing variation, rather like aluminium and herb and -ize etc.