tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Sep 18 05:34:06 2014

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: [Tlhingan-hol] do any human cultures count like Klingons do?

lojmitti7wi7nuv ([email protected]) 

I'm curious as to how Roman Numerals would figure into this. It's a zero-free number system that is sort of base five and sort of base ten, since, in earlier versions, you count one, two, three, four, five, five + one, five + two, five + three, five + four, ten, ten + one... and the ten character is basically two five characters (upright over inverted).

Later versions changed it to one, two, three, five - one, five, five + one, five + two, five + three, ten - one, ten, ten + one, with new characters for fifty, a hundred, a thousand... It's an odd notation.

It's no wonder that everybody went to decimal, until computers came along and went binary, which we then summarize as hexidecimal as a compromise between human and computer numbers.

I'm still amazed that Newton came up with his physics before math notation existed. He had to describe everything in spoken language written down.

On Sep 18, 2014, at 4:12 AM, De'vID <[email protected]> wrote:

> In The Klingon Dictionary, Section 5.2, the Klingon numbers are
> enumerated as follows:
> 1, 2, 3;
> 3+1, 3+2, 3+3;
> 2*3+1, 2*3+2, 2*3+3;
> 3*3+1, 3*3+2, 3*3+3; etc.
> 
> Mathematicians would immediately recognise this as 3-adic notation
> (see 3-adic under
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijective_numeration#Properties_of_bijective_base-k_numerals).
> 
> This system is interesting, because while it's a base-3 or ternary
> notational system, "3" is not written as "10", but as its own symbol.
> "6" is not written as "2 times 3" (or 2 shifted by one position), but
> as "3+3".
> 
> This is how you'd count in 3-adic notation, if we allow the "tens"
> position to represent 3 and the "hundreds" position to represent 9):
> 0, 1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 21, 22, 23, 31, 32, 33, 111, 112, 113, 121,
> 122, 123, ...
> 
> So decimal 12 is written as "33" (what TKD would call "3*3+3"), and
> decimal 18 is written as "123" (or "3*3+2*3+3" using TKD notation).
> 
> Everyone is aware that Marc Okrand chose OVS grammar because it's rare
> among human languages. He apparently pulled something similar off with
> Klingon mathematics. Does any human culture count like this? (Simple
> tallying, of course, is 1-adic notation, but that's always used
> alongside a decimal or base-20/30/60 system. Ignoring simply tallying
> and advanced mathematics, do any human cultures even use p-adic
> notation in any base?)
> 
> I couldn't find anything with a quick Google search, but then
> anthropologists probably wouldn't use a term like "p-adic notation",
> and mathematicians wouldn't usually be writing about ancient human
> cultures. I figured someone on this list would know, though.
> 
> -- 
> De'vID
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Tlhingan-hol mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://mail.kli.org/mailman/listinfo/tlhingan-hol


_______________________________________________
Tlhingan-hol mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.kli.org/mailman/listinfo/tlhingan-hol

Back to archive top level