Re: CHAT: Measurements (was: Re: CHAT: browsers)

Christophe wrote:
>  After dealing with
> > English, I'm sure we could easily compel the maggelophones to borrow
> > the
> > proper words for 10^6, 10^12 etc, as well as forcing them to use
> > "muorhiadf"
> > for 10^4.
> >
>
>Something I need to warn you: trying to force Maggel speakers to do
>anything
>will generally make you end up on the menu for the next dinner.
I'm inedible. Muahahaha ... and I'm evil too - the early versions of Cyran
orthography are at least as bad as Maggel. /s/ could be written in several
ways; "s", "ss", "sz", "z", "zz", "zh" and "zhz". "Y" was impredictably
either /i/ or /j/, "h" could mean /h/, /e/ or be silent. Both vowels and
consonants could be doubled without any change of pronunciation, and /e/,
one of the commonest phonemes could be unwritten. There's absolutely no way
of telling that "Mzn" is /mesene/, rather than, say /emzen/ or /m=zn=/, and
given the pronunciation, it could just as well be spelt "Mhzhznne".

>And why would they need a word for 10^4 when they have a base 20 system?
>They
>already have |iuemahl| ["yImIL] for "8000".
What makes you think I'm going to allow 'em to continue to count in base 20?
I'm going to make them count in base 10 000.

                                                 Andreas

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