Numbers

Now this is the part where it is explained why “doing things in sixes” was part of the plan, as stated in the introduction. While it’s the most common, and has largely become standard in the modern world, not every language uses a decimal (base-10) system for counting. There are or have been languages which use(d) base 4,5,6,8,12,15,20, or 27 instead, and possibly others. If you count “double-radix” number systems (for example, later in their history the Sumerians used a counting system which alternated in base 6 and 10, for a pseudo-base 60)  then there are even more. By accident and for reasons which had nothing to do with this project, I found some benefit in counting in base 6. (If you use the fingers of one hand as the digits 0-5, and the other hand for another digit in the “6’s” place, you can count to 35 instead of 10… that’s the simple version. I also came up with a way which allows you to easily count up to 46655 on your fingers. In yo’ face, decimal system!) With some experimentation, I also found some reasons to favor using base 6 in math over base 10. So I figured, as long as I’m doing an exotic language, I might as well make use of this. I should also give the hypothetical speakers of this language, at least on an unconscious level, as many reasons as possible to think of six as being some kind of universal basis for everything. Of course it’s possible that most of my “coincidental” (read: deliberate) insertions of 6 wouldn’t really affect people in that way. But even so, it gives some structure to work with if nothing else.

(Also, I worked out that Pi to the first 12 decimal places is 3.050330051415 in base 6. Because I’m insane. I also figured the 13th digit just to make sure the 12th doesn’t round up. It’s 1, so no.)

Now it wasn’t until later that I realized, hey, if I’m going to be doing the letters in groups of sixes, then it’s possible to generate random words using charts and a six-sided die…! That would certainly be away of avoiding my usual word-making tendencies. Of course, I reserve the right to throw out any random constructions which don’t seem to work well or are already being used as another word. Also, the system of charts I designed ended up being fairly complicated, partly to make the phonetics use “unbalanced” (not every sound is used equally often in a language). So for the names of the numbers, I decided to randomly match each of the numbers from 1-6 with each of the vowels and each of the stops in V-C order, then use the full charts to completely randomly generate a word for zer0. This should make these words as distinctive from each other as possible. It ended up with:

• One  –  en
• Two  –  om
• Three  –  ing
• Four  –  ab
• Five  –  ug
• Six  –  yd
• Zero  –  ijahed

Possibly amusing side note: I had to throw out the very first randomly generated word for zero because it came up as “ab” – which is already being used as four!  Yeah, that’s not gonna work. Anyway, if we use a fairly simple way of stating larger numbers, one can count higher using these:

• twelve  –  om yd
• eighteen  –  ing yd
• twenty-four  –  ab yd
• thirty  –  ug yd

There’s some question whether “yd” should be pluralized in some manner, and /or if there should be some kind of equivalent of “and” or “with” or suchlike between the sixes and the ones. An example of both at once would be the decimal number 26 (42 in base 6) being spoken as “four sixes and two”. That’s something to deal with later, I guess.