Re: Numbers from 1-10
| From: | Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, August 30, 2003, 2:55 |
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Andrew Patterson wrote:
> You will notice that ten can be divided by one two and five,(three factors)
> but twelve can be divided exactly by one, two, three, four and six (five
> factors)and indeed although five and seven don't divide twelve exactly,
> they do divide to produce a non recurring fraction in base twelve.
Actually, 1/5 in base 12 is .2497249724972497 ... and 1/7 is
.186A35186A35186A35 ...
But, 1/3 is a more frequently needed fraction than 1/5.
> Base twenty seems to have been used in many different counting systems and
> seems to have been carried into a number of languages. I supose that it is
> only with the advent of Arabic numerals that any languages truely became
> base ten as it forses the use of a rigid place value.
Most languages are base 10, pure and simple. English, for example, is
pretty much purely base 10, altho sound changes have obscured the origin
of "eleven" and "twelve". Some languages are base 20, some are base 5,
some are other bases. Some languages have a mixture, usually due to
language contact or change; for example, the Celtic languages used base
20, French, due to Gaullish influence, acquired some base 20, while
Nahuatl uses 5's for 1-19, but then 20's above that, so that 57 would
translate literally as something like "two twenties three fives two",
and then special words for 400, 8000, 160,000 etc.
Why those numbers? Obviously because humans have 5 fingers on each
hand, 10 total, and 5 toes on each foot for a total of 20 digits. There
are some languages
Miklapan languages tend to be 6, 12 or 16. They have six fingers on
each hand, and two toes on each foot. Uatakassi is base 12 (altho its
written numbers, below 144, are based on 6, since it was borrowed from
Sanle which uses base 6; higher numbers were redefined into base 12 -
numbers are written similar to hanzi, i.e., separate characters for 1-6,
and then for 36, 216, etc.; but the Kassi redefined the character for
216 to mean 144)
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