Oddities of Math and Language

[plaidviking]

While knitting, I come upon the realization that English has the remnants of Base 12 counting in our words for the numbers. For those of you unfamiliar w/ Base counting, it is essentially the number you count up to before your digit moves over. Now modern mathematics is based on Base 10, often given for the fact that we have 10 digits. Though this

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[singingdragon]

And because I'm just that dorky, I went and looked up Klingon counting. Ancient Klingon was apparently actually base 3, but they started using base 10 after being in contact with other species. Amusingly, they ended up using words for musical notes (the Klingon equivalent of do re mi fa so la ti) for most of the new numbers.

There are a bunch of real languages that don't use Base 10. I found a fun list of number systems here.

Huli - Base 15. From Papua New Guinea.

Ndom - Base 6. From Frederik Hendrik Island, near New Guinea.

Celtic languages are Base 20. Sort of. They have words for numbers up to 20, and then you just have keep track of how many times you've counted to 20 because there aren't actually words for more than that. And the words for 11-19 are really just combinations of 10 and 1-9.

Mayan was Base 20, not Base 5. Though it did have Base 5 cycles in the simple version of the notation. They had a much more complicated counting system (or possibly a few different ones, I'm not sure from my brief skimming) for their calendar system, but that wasn't so great for general arithmetic.

Ndruna (also called Ngiti), from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is Base 32 with Base 4 cycles.

Babylonian was Base 60! Though there's some internal Base 10 structure to the notation. You'd right 23 as "two tens and three", but 83 would be "one, two tens and three".

[singingdragon]

Correction: Celtic languages do actually have systems for counting to more than 20. Wikipedia is just stupid.

[plaidviking]

Ah yes, Wikipedia. A good springboard for research, but in this age of instant gratification, we tend to latch onto it as law.

[singingdragon]

Yeah. It's just good enough most of the time that it can be hard to spot the failure points. If I'm ever more than casually interested in something, I'll tend to go looking for actual scholarly articles. You can find peer-reviewed articles on ANYTHING.

Well, almost anything. Once a couple of us were trying to figure out how quickly caffeine got into your bloodstream, since someone was wondering if that almost-instant buzz from coffee was biological or a psychosomatic anticipation of an actual caffeine buzz. Yeah, nobody has done that study. As far as we could find, nobody has ever bothered to test serum caffeine levels less than 15 minutes after drinking coffee, which is around when caffeine levels peak. That's more knowledge than I had, but it didn't actually answer the question. A biochemist friend looked into how easy it would be for us to just do the experiment ourselves, but apparently caffeine assays are difficult and annoying.