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Re: Counting in Toono

From:Matt Pearson <mpearson@...>
Date:Friday, May 7, 1999, 15:19
>>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. ------------------------------------ Matt Pearson mpearson@ucla.edu UCLA Linguistics Department 405 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543 ------------------------------------