Re: Counting in Toono

>>Interesting system.  I've never heard of a base-9 system, and especially
>>not with this system! 1, 2, 3, 4, 9-4, 9-3, 9-2, 9-1, 9 - fascinating.
>
>It's based on the "balanced ternary" system discussed by Donald Knuth,
>which has the digits 0, 1, and -1. Negation is just a matter of flipping
>the digits, and so on.
>Do you think that it's just _too_ bizarre for a naturalistic artlang?
>Numbering feels consciously artificial enough to me that having a weird
>number system doesn't bother me too much.
Reminds me of how we tell time after the half hour:  Rather than "three
quarters after eight" we say "a quarter to nine".  Then there's languages
where 8:30 is "half nine" - i.e. halfway to nine.

When I looked at your original post, I 'read' the numbers above four
as "four before nine", "three before nine", "two before nine", and
"one before nine" - kind of like a countdown to nine - rather than as
"nine minus four", "nine minus three", etc..  Thinking in terms of
subtraction makes my head spin, but thinking in terms of counting order
(e.g. the second-to-last number before you reach nine) makes perfect
sense!

Matt.

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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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