Re: Numbers ancient & modern (was: Unilang report)

En réponse à Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>:

>
> Yoruba (IIRC) does something similar.
>
That was the one I was looking for. Indeed, AFAIK, Yoruba counts through
substraction instead of addition. There's also this nice system (so nice that I
use it for Notya) used by some South American languages (don't remember which),
which, counting by scores, say things like "1-1-20" for "1", that's to say: "the
first of the first score". 10 will be "10-1-20": "the tenth of the first score"
and 21 "1-2-20": "the first of the second score". It's quite nice for big
numbers, like 163: "3-9-20", making them as short as small numbers.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr