How to count
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A surprisingly intuitive way to count which is perhaps better than decimal
This public article was written by [Deactivated User] on 6 Dec 2018, 09:36.
[comments] lsjnumbersystem
1. How to count
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2. Plural Pronouns
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3. Pronouns V2
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Basics:I will begin this explanation by teaching it in its most direct mode. Begin, if you have five fingers on a hand ,by making a fist with that hand. From there, begin counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 lifting a finger for each. Once at 5, close the hand again and lift a finger on your other hand, and count that finger as 6. This is base 6, and it works very naturally with five-fingered hands. On two complete hands, one can count up to 35 (five sixes plus five).
The next concern is digit grouping. Six is, naturally, not ten, and so the scale will be different. One thousand represents 10^3, and in base 6 the number which looks like 1000 will have a value of 216. Instead of grouping digits in triplets, as in base ten, this language will group digits in pairs of pairs (sets of four) because 1,00 00 represents a value of 1296, much closer to base ten's triplet system than 216.
Counting Large Numbers:
While this conlang will have its own translations for the numbers and notations, I have devised an English notation to help the learning process by first doing so in English. First acknowledge the pattern in base ten of "ty" or "dy" at the ends of multiples of ten, such as twenty, thirty, up to ninety. In base six, instead of "ty" which genuinely comes from 'ten', use "sy". For 11 and 12 exceptions are given akin to base ten not calling 11 "onety one", instead it combines one with 'left', as in 'left over', and so 'seven' and 'eight' are borrowed directly. So, counting: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 (six), 11 (seven), 12 (eight), 13 (threeks), 14 (fourkx), 15 (fiks), and 20 (twosy). from there, it's really the same convention until you get to 55, when it overflows to 100. This is what is denoted as a "hand" (akin to how hundred comes from 'hound count') representing the two hands that counted up this far. From here, keep counting up to 55 55, read "fivesy five hand fivesy five", and finally we reach a number similar to a thousand. This is called a ground (both a pun on grand and representative of feet, as if you counted using each of the four limbs for each of the four digits) and from here a kind of million/billion convention would begin, where the prefix represents how many groups of four zeroes would be needed to represent the number.
Translations:
0-5: sku, wh (wə), jo, di, vɛ , pɛ
6, 7, 8: kxi, kwi, xoki (for 6, x is optional, and for 8 x cannot be j) (joki is informal hello, and also twelve)
6+3,4,5: 3,4,5 -si
12, 18, 24, 30: joki, diki, vɛki , pɛki
36: mae (also the word for hand, treated like -hundred)
(numbers from 2 to 35) * 36: simply that number with 'mae' at the end.
1296 (6^4): suwa
Comparison:
Now for the comparison of systems. In base 6, the main factors are 2, 3, since 2*3=6; likewise in base 10 the factors are 2, 5. Here I will skip over many points and go directly to the idea: fractions. In base 6, all the reciprocals (1/x) of 2 through 10 are easy to represent.
| 1/2 | 1/3 | 1/4 | 1/5 | 1/6 | 1/7 | 1/8 | 1/9 | 1/10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.3 | 0.2 | 0.13 | 0.[1] | 0.1 | 0.[05] | 0.043 | 0.04 | 0.0[3] |
| 0.5 | 0.[3] | 0.25 | 0.2 | 0.1[6] | 0.[142857] | 0.125 | 0.[2] | 0.1 |
In both systems it is a matter of expressing the number as something that looks like x/10 of some form, in base six 3/10 is the same as 1/2, and so 1/2 is represented as 0.3, and so on. ✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article
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