Day One opens - but which day is it?
Does your alarm clock alarm shrill and scream at you to fall out of bed and start the working day?
Or is it a day off, a holiday? |
And now you're in a new world, a world where numbers may look familiar, but are rather different. Is that the alarm clock? | Rub your eyes and look again |
Starting with the number names - There have been many suggestions for the words we need for our new numbering system - not just in English, either; I am going to suggest some just so that we can begin to talk in dozenal; they won't please everyone, but then, they're not meant to be taken as the only possible set nor as being as immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians! To start with I shall keep "ten" and "eleven" and add "zen" for the dozen, "zandred" for the gross. |
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, onezen (*10); onezen-one, onezen-two, onezen-three .... onezen-eleven, twozen (*20); and then threezen (*30), fourzen, fivezen, sixzen, sevenzen, eightzen, ninezen, tenzen, elevenzen and zandred (*100). |
Yes, some of these sound quite awful, and need to be turned into proper English by knocking off the corners and rubbing them down with emery paper; (how about "semzen" for 70, "levzen" for E0? See some suggestions.) But they'll do for the moment so that we can demonstrate our ideas. (Any other suggestions for names? Especially "great gross", and "gross"- for which I'm using "zandred" here. Check out those made by some of our readers on site and more in the Dozenal Forum).
So what time is it by our clock? |