Re: ConNumbers

Many human languages don't strictly have a "base-anything" counting
system, but count on parts of the body, for example, with a canonical
counting order (one hand, the other hand, toes, etc) and numbers that
refer to the body parts being counted.

I know I've heard of a number system that included a base-four
component (it wasn't strictly base-four, but some parts of it had the
names of multiples of four) and these numbers were "three dogs"
(twelve), "four dogs" (sixteen)... based on numbers of legs.

I'm sure there's some way you can figure out a system which was once
based on something idiosyncratic like that and eventually regularized
into a base six system.


Ed Heil ------ edheil@postmark.net
--- http://purl.org/net/edheil ---

Chris Peters wrote:

>         I have a conlang question with a natlang correlation to ask of
y'all.  Just
> like many of you said to me in regards to a previous list thread, a
> conculture seems to be "magically" developing along with my conlang.  I
> guess it's true, a language needs to be spoken, and a conlang
> (theoretically) needs to have an application in a con-reality.  Right?  :)
>
>         Here's my paradox:  the number six seems to be cropping up as an
important
> feature of Ricadh and its conculture.  It's an important focal point of the
> Ricadh writing system (which is partially ideographic, like Japanese); for
> reasons which I won't go into too much detail here, Ricadh characters are
> classified in groups of six.  That in turn led me to the thought of
> assigning numerical values to the characters, as in Hebrew.  And of course,
> that fits best with a base-6 number system, because of the sheer number of
> different characters (I plan on 216) -- the characters themselves could
> serve as a sort of numeric shorthand.  (Analogy:  Binary => Hexadecimal.)
>
>         So I thought to myself, who would count in base-6?  Certainly
nobody I know
> about ... all natlangs I've even touched in my studies count in base-10.
> And I'm rather prejudiced against creating an alien culture for my language
> (the reasons for that are best left to a different thread).  So I'd like to
> know from y'all, is there a precedent for any human language with a number
> system besides base-10?  And how did that manifest itself in the culture
> that used it?
>
>     -- Chris
>
>
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