Re: Picto & Dil

Hi!

Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> writes:
>...
> In other words, just add the plural ending to the units - just like
> Schleyer's Volapük! Arie de Jong's reformed Volapük is better than Dil in
> this matter. He introduced the word _deg_ for 10, and the other tens are
> formed in the same way as Esperanto (and modern Welsh :) by combining the
> words for 2, 3, 4 etc with 10, thus:
> teldeg = 20, kildeg = 30, foldeg = 40 etc.
And what's '200' in this lang?  I suspect it is tel + another special
word (teltum maybe like in Volapük)?  What's '2000'?  Again tel +
another special word (maybe 'telmil')?  But '20000' is totally
different (like 'teldegmil')?  And the next level of base words is 'a
million', 'a billion', etc? (balion, kelion, ...)?

I still don't like this specialised treatment of a few exceptional
bases (like 10, 100, 1000 in many IE langs and 10, 100, 1000, 10000 in
most East Asian langs) with a second level of special bases (e.g. a
million in English or '100 million' in Japanese).  It introduces an
asymmetry and makes translation of large numbers between, say,
Japanese and English were hard.  Try translating '123,456,789' from
English into Japanese.  That's very painful.

My approach that originally for Tyl Sjok uses a base and exponent
representation.  Much more symmetry there:

   (zero ten) three = 3,
   (one) ten  three = 30,
   two   ten  three = 300,
   three ten  three = 3000,
   four  ten  three = 30000
   etc.

   Stuff in () is optional.

It's quite simple to translate between this and English, I think.
Unfortunately, there is no empirical data about this claim. :-)

(The above number would be
   'nine ten one two three four five six seven eight nine'
in Tyl Sjok, BTW.  Erm, with all words directly translated, of
course. :-))

Errrm, all this is not an auxlang argument for me, but a purely
artistic, esthetical issue.  I only feel that auxlangs, with their
special design goals, are one class of langs thot should have some
similar ideas.  OTOH, I also feel that highly abstract artlangs like
Ithkuil should do better than natlangs ('better' = 'symmetric')
instead of using complex but asymmetric number systems.  (The number
system was really the only part of Ithkuil that I found a bit immature
-- the rest was estonishing, of course, because it is so very well
elaborated.)

**Henrik

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