Re: OT-ish: txt - Could it replace Standard Written English?

Quoting Roger Mills <romilly@...>:
> Educational side-note:  It never occurred to me as a child, and we
> certainly
> weren't taught, that it was possible to count in other than base 10.
> Probably in the 50s, as computers became known, some teacher discussed
> base
> 2; quite accidentally, at age 29 (1963), I learned about other bases and
> how
> to manipulate them from one of Morris Kline's books-- he the "creator"
> of
> "new math" which was becoming popular in pedagogical circles then.
I've got a talent for learning things by osmosis - I've never set out learn
binary, nor octal and hex, but just hanging around with the geekier of my
friends evidently did the trick. When, in high school, we had to learn basic
binary calculation, I was astounded to see that the overwhelming majority of
my classmates had huge problems to grasp non-decimal bases. I still fail to
see what the difficulty is (apart from that everyone's used to decimal) - I'm
mean it's frikken exactly parallel to decimal (as long as we stick to real
positive integer bases at least), but then I've long known that other people
(all six billion of you) think strangely.

ObConlang: Tairezazh, and presumably it's relatives altho' I've not created
their number systems yet, uses base 10 (which, intrafictionally, is our
fault), but with a twist with regard to number names; instead of having names
for powers of 10^3 (thousand, million, billion, sextiliard etc) or for powers
of 10^4 (like Chinese), it has names for 10^(2^n), where n is a non-negative
integer. So you get _thel_ "10", _ksád_ "100", _tsfail_ "10 000",
_gzhour_ "100 000 000" etc. "10^11" would thus be _thelksádgzhour_, lit "ten-
hundred-(hundred million)" For more details, see the Tairezazh article on ACP
(anjo.free.fr).

                                                             Andreas

PS I should decide the other day if I should refer to Tairezazh's relatives
with their Tairezan names (which are the names I typically use in-cortex), or
by their own self-designations (which would perhaps make more sense). I may
not matter much if I speak of _Steianzh_ (Tairezan name-form) or _Steienzh_
(native equivalent), but people may be forgiven for not realizing that
_Tsárizh_ and _Searixina_ isn't the same. Do anyone have any opinions on this?

                                                              Andreas

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