Re: Numbers

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU]On
> Behalf Of Barry Garcia
> Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2000 2:52 AM
> To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
> Subject: Re: Numbers
> raccoon@elknet.net writes:
> >This isn't conlangish, but an interesting thing I learned about
> a natlang,
> >Gaelic (the Scottish variety at least). A friend of mine told me that
> >Gaelic
> >speakers usually say the names of years in English if the Gaelic version
> >is
> >long. However, they say <da` mhil> (or something like that, not sure of
> >the
> >exact spelling) for 2000 because it's so short :) They also
> often give the
> >days of the week in English.
> Interesting. I could see the Saalangal doing the same thing, if they were
> ever colonized by a nation who had shorter ways to say large numbers :). I
> know that in the Philippines, Spanish numerals and Tagalog numerals are
> used a lot (IIRC, the Tagalog ones are used when doing bargaining, etc.,
> and the spanish ones are used for other purposes. Often they are mixed).
In my language Dhakrathat, I think I will use a combination of base 12 and
base 10. The speakers of Dhak traditionally used 12, but because of contact
with humans grudgingly came to use base 10 at least in their dealings with
them. So there's a set of words for numbers from 1 to 11, and words for 12,
144, etc., but also words for 10, 100, etc., borrowed from a human language.
The problem is that I'm not sure what words to use for the human-derived
numerals. In the past I based the languages of my conworld on natlangs, but
I want to make Dhak as a priori as possible, so it'd be kind of strange to
borrow from a natlang. On the other hand, I don't think it'd be that bad --
the name Dhakrathat itself originally was inspired by <dragon> anyway.

Dhak will have a native system for writing base 12 numbers, and will use
that world's equivalent of Hindu-Arabic numerals for base 10, thus no
confusion as we saw with Axiem's post :)

Eric Christopherson
raccoon@elknet.net