#counting systems

[itsreallystupid]

Pirate Counting System, according to Corazòn and Paniers (Chart of Darkness)

1

2

3

Several

Enough

All

7

Yar

8

[llyfrenfys]

Just for fun! Welsh learners- which do you prefer?

Which do you prefer

Traditional counting system "un ar ddeg"

Decimal counting system "un deg un"

Show results

Voting ended onApr 18, 2023

[coquelicoq]

i'm supposed to do 40 reps a day of various PT exercises and it was getting boring counting to 40 all the time, so i decided to do it in base 4 and base 8 to shake things up a bit. after a while that got boring too so i was like, what's another factor of 40? oh, ten. let's do it in base ten. tra la la here i go counting all the way to ten and then starting ov- hey wait a minute

[linguisticalities]

'Anumeric' people: What happens when a language has no words for numbers?

From the Amazon to Nicaragua, there are humans who never learn numbers. What can these anumeric cultures teach us about ourselves?

[allthingslinguistic]

An interesting blog post about counting systems on the Morph blog. Excerpt: 

In order to feed his family for the year, and prove himself a worthy man, a man living in southern New Guinea is expected to grow 1296 yams (dioscorea sp.) each season. In Ngkolmpu, a language spoken by around 200 people who live in this region in a single village 15kms within the Indonesian side of the border between West Papua and Papua New Guinea, there is a single word for this number ntamnao.

To speakers of English, this seems like an arbitrarily specific number; yet to Ngkolmpu speakers it’s perfectly natural. Ngkolmpu, along with most of its related languages, has what is known as a senary numeral system also known as a base-six system. In English, we use a decimal system which is based on recursions of ten units while senary systems are based around recursions of six. In Ngkolmpu, the words for one to six are naempr, yempoka, yuow, eser, tampui and traowow. Seven is naempr traowo naempr or ‘one six and one;’ thirteen is yempoka traowo naempr or ‘two six and one.’ You should be starting to see the pattern now. But what happens when you get to six groups of six, i.e. 62 or 36? Well there is a specific word for that ptae.  In fact, in Ngkolmpu there are words for 62, 63, 64 and 65. That’s all the way up to 7776! Related language Komnzo even has a word wi which is used for 66 or 46,656! [...]

The significance of counting yams in these cultures has been hypothesised as the motivation for the development this counting system; something we don’t really see anywhere else in the world. The next question is why base six and not some other number? Well, the main yams consumed in this region are teardrop shaped with a round end and a narrow end. These when placed into small piles naturally fall into neat piles of 6. 

Read the whole thing.

[coquelicoq]

back with more random chinese answers to the not-questions in your tags. first a small correction: 'san' is three and 'si' is four. But as for what Lan Yi calls Wei Wuxian relative to Baoshan Sanren, it's 徒孙 (tu2sun1), which basically means grand-disciple. 徒 is disciple (often seen as 徒子 tuzi or 徒弟 tudi) and 孙 is grandson or grandchild.

[re some tags in which i counted to four incorrectly]

lmao my bad!! okay well now i know seven chinese characters, lol. and i can count all the way to four in the correct order, as of this moment! four is all you need really. i've been doing my physical therapy reps in base four and it's going great. if i could learn the chinese word for zero then i could start doing them in chinese base four! counting to forty has never been so exciting!!

also thank you again for coming thru with answers to my burning questions around baoshan sanren & wei wuxian relationship terminology (i assume you are the same anon who told me what shizu means)! the web translator i was using was not translating any of the words in that sentence as "grandson" or "disciple" (it gave "sun" for 徒孙) so i was getting really confused.

[coquelicoq]

i keep saying "...twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-ten" in my physical therapy exercise reps so i've decided the french are valid for soixante-dix actually

[coquelicoq]

i was today years old when i realized that to double a number in binary you just move all the 1s over one slot to the left...they're powers of 2...you're multiplying the number by 2...hello...