As far as I can tell, I have fixed the numerals to work with my Hamming distance database (that I briefly mentioned in my end of February report), but I don’t want to say these are final. In order to get numerals to work in the way that I wanted them to work, I had to break some other patterns in my database, which is probably going to leave me with even fewer disyllabic roots in the future, but it felt like a necessary sacrifice. Numerals are important—having as many disyllabic roots as possible is also important, but it is less important*.
letter («syun-») | number («hu-») | name suffix |
h | 0 | «-han» |
m | 1 | «-mam» |
n | 2 | «-nal» |
p | 3 | «-pal» |
t | 4 | «-tla» |
k | 5 | «-kam» |
s | 6 | «-sam» |
y | 7 | «-yal» |
l | 8 | «-lan» |
9 | «-mla» | |
A | «-nya» | |
B | «-pya» | |
C | «-tyam» | |
D | «-klan» | |
E | «-syal» | |
F | «-myan» | |
10 | «-mamhan» | |
a | «-ha» | |
e | «-he» | |
i | «-hi» | |
o | «-ho» | |
u | «-hu» |
Greyfolk language usually uses a duodecimal system, which is 1–9, A–B, 10. However, the numbers are set up to also be compatible with a hexadecimal system, which is 1–9, A–F, 10. Of course, it can work with smaller systems like our typical decimal system, which is just 1–10. I may or may not later create specific words for ‘hundred’, ‘thousand’, ‘million’, etc.
*As I talked about before, what really matters is the number of phonemes in a given root/word in terms of how simple/quick it is to utter. (I still have not found or even looked for a source on that yet, and, even if that is somewhat true, it is obviously not the only factor.) This is a tangent, but I was previously very focused on using every disyllabic root I could, and that led me to using 7-phoneme disyllabic roots. However, if the number of phonemes is so important, then it would make just as much sense to start looking at trisyllabic roots. At a minimum, they will have six phonemes, which is still pretty low, which makes the roots «manasa» and «mansan» comparable thought the former is trisyllabic and the latter is disyllabic.