Re: numeration system

Ray Brown scripsit:

> In the early day of the telephone, it was found that "nought" and "four"
> were readily confused over bad lines, so people got into the habit of
> saying "oh" for 0 ("zero" is becoming quite often used nowadays also).
The telephone is still reckoned an American invention, I think, and "nought"
for 0 is rare here, so I don't think that's the explanation.  I think it
more likely that "zero" was the only disyllabic number (with the marginal
exception of "seven"), and using "oh" made it easier to keep to the rhythm.

The rhythm of telephone numbers is very important to North Americans:
we expect to hear "(one), two one two, five five five, six six six six"
with pauses as noted.  When the pauses are omitted or come in the wrong
places (as when a non-NA caller leaves his number on a message), the
resulting number is very hard to understand without several repetitions.
All numbers are exactly ten digits long, of which the last seven digits
are the local number, so this pattern is fixed.

> 5 and 9 still cause problems and people will use forms like 'fivah' or
> 'ninah' in order to make the final consonant clearer.
The underlying forms are "fiver" and "niner", based on what rhotic
speakers use.  Before this convention was adopted, the British military
used "fife" for "five" over the radio.

[various other systems snipped]

The Lojban digits were carefully engineered:  pa, re, ci, vo, mu, xa,
ze, bi, so; zero is no.  Note the distinct consonants and the mnemonic
pattern of the vowels.  Larger numbers are spelled out digit-by-digit:
pano, papa, pare, ..., soso, panono, ...   There are conventions for
scientific notation, too.  (Orthography is IPA, except "c" for [S].)

--
In politics, obedience and support      John Cowan <jcowan@...>
are the same thing.  --Hannah Arendt    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

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