Re: Numbers in Qthen|gai (and in Tyl Sjok) [long]

Hi!

Tim May <butsuri@...> writes:
> Henrik Theiling wrote at 2005-01-08 22:56:07 (+0100)
>  > Hi!
>  >
>  > I'd like to give the promised introduction to the number system of
>  > Qthen|gai.
>  >
>
> I was just thinking about how numbers are going to work in LC-01, so I
> was interested to see this.* It's a neat system.  I had to play around
> on paper for a while to convince myself that there weren't any
> ambiguous sequences - what with the recursive exponentiation and all -
> but it looks like there aren't.
Of course, when designing it, I did the same. :-)

> One question - if you're writing in, say, base 10, is 10 written "10"
> or "10 1"?
Just '10', because its shorter and '1' as a single coefficient is
redundant.  Just like it is not '1 10', simply '10'.

(BTW, it's also spoken this way, so 10 = 'kjox' in Tyl Sjok and 12 =
'kjox ling kul' (or 'liku' as a digit, IIRC), 20 = 'kul kjok', etc.
Same for Qthen|gai, I just forgot the digit words... :-))

> * I was relieved to find that your system wasn't too similar to what
>   I'd come up with. (Of course, LC-01's sytem might grow more or less
>   similar to Qthen|gai's between now and the time when I'm ready to
>   present it to the list.  Any ideas I have about the language are
>   provisional until I have a working basis for a self-segregating
>   morphology.)
As I now know that some natlangs really reverse the whole digit
stream, I might try to optimise my system further (optimising = coming
closer to my internal ideal, whatever that is :-)).  But currently, I
would not really know how to do digit reversal in an elegant way, so I
think the system is quite stable now.

**Henrik