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Re: The Sand Reckoner in Your ‘Langs

From:Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...>
Date:Monday, April 6, 2009, 20:01
Thank you, Michael Poxon, Kelvin Jackson, Alex Fink, Roger Mills, Mechthild
Czapp, and Veoler.
Kelvin, the Vašt î Kûvik suffix -ag, looks like a version of the "normal sequential
system", a geometric sequence; right?
Roger, Gwr and Kash are also, roughly, translations of the systems we normally
use; would you agree?
Mechthild, Rejistanian's informal system is interesting not least because it let
me find out about Gideon Gono! :-)
Veoluur, Waltuur's system is a successive-squaring system using base six, and
going from 6 up to 6^16 ( sa' in Waltuur ), right? But I have a question about
<http://veoler.googlepages.com/collcon_lexicon.html#num>
; if the speakers are illiterate why do they have words for pi (hug) and the
square-root of two (hii)?  What happened to make many of them need these
words before many of them needed to write anything down?
Alex, someone on another forum pointed out the Chinese "fourth alternative",
but I didn't understand until I saw this:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals#Large_numbers>
. It's basically like Knuth's "-yllion" system, using successive squaring starting
at 10^8 and going up to 10^4096.
Knuth's words for numbers are worked out up to 10^(2^100), I believe; but
his notation for writing them aren't _fully_ worked-out beyond 10^32.
Do you agree?

Replies

Roger Mills <romiltz@...>
Veoler <veoler@...>