From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Tue May 19 2009 - 17:54:49 CDT
Thomas LAMBERT wrote:
> - script X and a script E (not a bad choice but seems awkward in use)
> - T and E (for Ten and Eleven which i found stupid because doz ten =
> dec twelve, it just leads to confusions)
> - A , B (which has not been chosen by any dozenal society)
> - *, # (the worst in my opinion)
> - rotated 2 to represent ten and a rotated or horizontally flipped 3
> (Ꜫ) for eleven (which i found quite nice but i did not found a rotated
> 2 in unicode. Do you know if such a char exists ?)
You can do worse than £ for looking a *little* like a horizontally
flipped 2. There are also a few Cherokee letters that might fit that
bill. ⵒ U+2D52 TIFINAGH LETTER YAP happens to look like a rotated 2 in
the fonts I'm looking at, but borrowing from an entirely different
typographic tradition makes it more likely that font differences will
wind up making things look horrible. You could also consider something
like ʔ, which is not mirror-reversed, but doesn't look quite like a 2
anyway. Or ʖ, which is inverted. Though there isn't much that's
particularly 2-like about the number in question.
I remember when I was a kid when I first heard about hexadecimal I
thought that using A-F for the new digits was boring, and I made up a
set of symbols and names for them. Can't really remember examples anymore.
> Also i would like to add the counting constraint. IE : be able to
> count out loud.
> How do you pronouce A4 ?
> "aty-four" sounds like eighty-four.
> This is not like hexadecimal which is just used in a more compact
> representation of binary : dozenal can be used to do math, and should
> be used to do math given it's magic properties (here again, see
> Wikipedia page).
You can do math in hexadecimal, and indeed people do. And yes, it's
annoying not to have easy words for "A4" aside from "ay-four". I knew
someone who would read the hexadecimal F as "fox", I assume part of a
set, and he didn't seem to feel it was unique or idiosyncratic, so I
guess there's a community out there which uses those. (I guess you could
use Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc. from the NATO phonetic alphabet or one
of its older versions. That's probably where the "Fox" is from. Still
doesn't construct names for multiples of 16).
~mark
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