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

Stephen Mulraney wrote:


> On Friday, Mar 07, Seven deety-three CE at eleven twenty-ee deeteen, Mar
07,
> H.S. Teoh wrote:
>
>  > [*] Nevertheless, sometimes I take perverse pleasure in reading hex
>  > numbers like 4B as "forty-B" and E5 as "Ety-five". :-P This is only
when I
>  > feel like deliberately speaking in riddles, though. Nothing like saying
>  > "there are B-hundred twenty-F pixels in that window" and getting all
those
>  > blank stares. :-)
>
>
> Still, as Tristan noted, the decimal place words (-teen, hundred,
> thousand) are rather incongruous. Forms like "deeteen" (see the very
> first line of this message) are very odd.
>
Only slightly incongruous, to me.  True, a nicer alternative would be to
devise unit characters for A,B,C,D,F.  I seem to recall someone using, for
base 12, Greek delta for 10, lambda for 11, calling them "dek" and
"elf"...."eight, nine, dek, elf, ten.....twenty dek etc."

Pre-technological Gwr had base 8; it's fairly easy (for challenged me) to
figure in.  Some of the perfect squares look a little startling at first--
3^2=11, 7^2=61, but one gets used to it. And
1,2,3,5,10,15,25,42,67,131,220...(called Na Kwæy's numbers) is just as
interesting as the base10 equivalent.

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.

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