Decided to show you all my take on the whole Matoran numerals debate.
A lot of people have pointed out in the past that the 1-9 symbols we have for Matoran numbers appear to show an incomplete pattern, with a repeat on a new inner ring happening on the number 6, which could theoretically be extrapolated out to show the numbers all the way to 11, and then continued on with further inner rings for higher numbers.
This has always been pretty cool, both for the implication that Matoran count in base 6 rather than base 10 (always neat to see different counting systems in sci-fi/fantasy stories) and because it implies that a single symbol can be used for any number, unlike our system which requires multiple for numbers above 9.
The only problem with this though is that it gets really unwieldy, really fast. Getting up to 11-12 is fine. You can just about get up to 17-18 and still have it easily readable, but after that it gets increasingly more difficult to fit everything in and still have the symbol recognisable at a glance. There are number systems that allow for one symbol per number even for much larger ones (I think Cistercian numerals are pretty neat and worth a google) but the inherent design of the Matoran symbols just doesn’t allow for easily readable higher numbers.
That’s why I’m proposing instead of a base 6 system with only one symbol per number, the Matoran might use a base 12 system with increasing digits per multiple of 12. I think this gives us the best of both worlds: we can extrapolate out the repeating symbols hinted at in the canon version, but not to such a degree that the symbols for higher numbers become functionally useless. Plus, as counting systems go, base 12 is actually really useful. It’s highly divisible, whilst still being small enough to have an easy number of individual symbols to memorise (unlike the even more highly divisible base 60).
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