Re: Numerals in Conlangs (was; The Saharan page (was; Basquearticle))

> FFlores wrote:
>
> > I use plain decimal numerals for Drasel=E9q. The only difference
> > with our numbers is that you begin by the lowest end. That is,
> > 1234 is 'four thirty two-hundred one-thousand'. It seems a bit
> > unnatural though... Do you know of natlangs who do this?
>
> Not so systematically.  But German says "three-and-thirty" for
> 33, and English once did too.  After 99 this little-endian
> system breaks down: 133 is "one hundred three and thirty".
One natlang which does this is Malagasy.  The current year, for
example, is something like "sivy aman-tsivifolo sy sivinjato sy
arivo", meaning "nine on ninety and nine-hundred and one-
thousand".  (I may be wrong about the "aman-", but that's
basically it.)  I don't know where the Malagasy got this
low-to-high strategy from - whether it's an Austronesian thing,
or an African thing, or just some language-particular
idiosyncrasy.

I adopted this strategy for my conlang Tokana.  So the current
year in Tokana would be "teiekpateiekta ki teiekpatam kunma",
which is "nine-on-ninety and nine-on-ten hundreds".  (Note that
the Tokana have no word for "thousand"; they count tens of
hundreds instead.  So 3000 is "thirty hundreds", for example.
The next highest denomination after hundred is "tolok", which is
a hundred hundreds, or ten-thousand.)

I don't find anything at all unnatural about reciting numbers
in low-to-high fashion.  As I see it, it makes just as much sense
to start with the part that changes over fastest (the units) as it
does to start with the part that changes over slowest (the tens,
or hundreds, or thousands, or whatever the case may be...).

Matt.