Word of the Week - Wednesday 23.4.2025
Aaaaa! I completely forgot to actually write today's Word of the Week, and I've been planning it all day! I've actually got a good one for y'all today:
Etymology: I don't have a protolang to show the actual etymology (hopefully I will one day!) but it's cognate with the word kjagg, meaning "pile."
I don't know how much I talked about Kolic numbers in the past, but up until today I only had number up to five. ynna, tälla, kaegða, júrða, ikka.
On my commute home today though, I reworked the system a little bit, actually settled on some things that I've been thinking about for a long time, and added some new stuff.
Kolic uses dozenal most the time (though in some situations decimal can be used and the two can even be combined, we might get into that sometime later). So, here are the number from one to a dozen in Kolic:
For numbers up to dozen eleven (23), you say [remainder] on dozen. Remember that Kolic doesn't really use adpositions and uses a lot of cases instead, and superessive (meaning "on") is one of them, marked "-na/-nä" (at least until I decide to rework the case markings again).
So a number like fifteen, or in dozenal, dozen three, is kaegða kjána.
As you might have guessed, above that you just say "two dozen," "three dozen" and so on. So for a number like 64 (decimal), which is 54 (dozenal), you'd say júrða júnnana kjään — literally "four on five of dozen."
But let's go back to the list of numbers from one to a dozen. You might have noticed a pattern that repeats after four numbers. It might be kinda subtle in the first repetition (except all of the number beginning the same way), but it gets way more transparent from eight to eleven.
That's right, there's a sub-base of four underneath the base twelve counting system. The words one, two, three, and four are unique, but then five, six, and seven are just blends of four and the remainder. Eight is a blend of two and four, because it is two fours, and nine through eleven are again blends of eight plus the remainder.
I thought of this on the train, when I was struggling to come up with numbers for six and up, and noticed that twelve goes really nicely into three groups of four, and decided to make a sub-base. I really like the way it came out, it gives me this vaguely Finnish-y vibe.
Finally, if I have any time left at all, let's talk VERY briefly about combining bases.
To be perfectly honest, I am kind of slowly losing my justifications for base 10 to coexist with base 12 in the Kolic culture. I mean, it would be a fun way to bring some more chaos and flavour into the language, but I am having trouble coming up with things they'd actually use it for. So this system I am going to describe may actually very well be out of date VERY soon. I'm not even going to use the Kolic words for the numbers, since 10 turned out to be a trisyllabic "täärðälla." But here is the idea behind it:
Basically, due to the way they conceptualise numbers as stacking remainders on larger numbers, they can use any larger number as a base. You might, for example, want two hundred eggs, and then a dozen six on top of that, which makes for six on dozen on two hundred eggs, as opposed to three on six dozen on one gross eggs. Yea no that system doesn't really make much sense, there is no reason anyone would count like this I think, but I still wanted to showcase it to show some of the dead ends I come across.
Oh! And although I already said finally once, here is, finally, for real this time, an example sentence:
Aeru néjin kjái irin kyfðva núnva. /ɑɪ̯.rə nɛɪ̯.jɪn kjɑu̯.ɪ ɪː.rɪn kɪːð.vɑ nʏn.vɑ/ [ɑɪ̯ɾə nɛɪ̯jɪn kjɑu̯wɪ ɪːɾɪn kɪːðʋɑ nʏnʋɑ]
English: There are dozens of flowers in front of our house.
lit. Is of-flowers dozens with-itself house-in_front_of our-in_front_of
gloss: be.N.ATEM flower-PL.GEN dozen-PL 3EXPL/REFL.COM house-ANT 1PL-POSS-ANT
Note: This is something I probably should've mentioned in the main body, but. Things that are being counted are always in the genitive-partitive case (in this case functioning as a partitive). The number behaves as an adverb, and if the verb doesn't agree with the counted noun, but instead always with the neuter gender. That's because the subject isn't the counted object (in this instance the flowers) but an expletive "it" that is "hidden," i don't know if that's the correct terminology but it's just. not there. It's omitted.
