OOC: Numbers in Mating Flight (slight revision)

[sythyry]

Some characters in Mating Flight use duodecimal. They are pretty emphatic about it -- they get annoyed when they discover that the natives of the new world have ten fingers because that means the wrong base, kind of thing. Duodecimal is a distinct point of pride with them.

Which means they use it everywhere, and powers of twelve too. Including metaphoric and approximate speech. So they'll say things like "A duodecade or two" not "a decade or two". I'm pretty happy with that.

The higher powers of twelve aren't so nice. scruff points out that twelve-cubed is a "great gross", though...

All actual numbers in the book are translated to decimal, by the way. Duodecimal only appears in approximate speech ("a dozen times that" vs. "ten times that"). Plus in multiples of things -- weeks are 12 days long, the dragons want a dozen times something as punative damages, etc. I'm not worried about most of this usage.

[Poll #1151730]

Comments

[mazlynn.livejournal.com]

I think the gross and great-gross usage is just fine, as long as it is explained at some point in the text, as I'm not sure the general reading public would be able to translate it effectively. But it could certainly be a side comment when they're marveling at the insanity of the twelve base system.

The other option if you want to make things more self explanatory and avoid the negative connotations of "Gross" would be to call it a "dozen-square" and "dozen-cube" or so forth.

Have you considered coming up with alternate terms for 11 and 12 in the language? Since "duodecade" is basically in reference to base 10, it's unlikely they'd use that particular term, and since I don't think the average public will intuitively recognize it without looking it up, creating your own naming system would probably scan just as well. I think "dozen" works find as a translation from their language since it doesn't really rely on base 10 specifically in the name, so maybe a "dozen-year" instead of a duodecade?

Just some random ramblings - no idea if they'd make sense in the context of your world setting. Every once in a while something comes along that makes me try to see from the viewpoint of a completely alien view point - I spent several hours trying to come up with a better name for the "alien section" in B5 (which my husband and I are watching since I hadn't seen it before) since it bothered me because the "aliens" probably wouldn't refer to themselves as such....

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

*nod* I would just make up words in their language for these things and then explain them in a glossary, with some context cues in the text so people can get the idea that a "frit" is a lot, not a little. Then if they want to know just how big a lot they can go look it up.

[archadia.livejournal.com]

/agree