Consistentliness and a New Number System
Before iMarc launches a site, we run it through a formal quality control process. The QC team tests every page, validates all HTML, tries to break all the dynamic tools, and submits bugs to our bug-tracking system if when something goes wrong.
Usually, about half the issues submitted pertain to inconsistencies. One error message is red, another is black. The phone number has dots on one page, dashes on another.
Today, Fred submitted an issue about the inconsistency of a page title.
At the bottom of his bug, he added:
Consistentliness is next to Godliness.
My current pet-peeve is inconsistencies in English numbers.
Let's examine.
My 4-year old daughter is learning to count, and if our number system was consistent, she'd be able to count to infinity by now.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine - No problems yet.
Let's skip "ten" for a minute. Eleven? What's that? Though it should, the word has nothing in common with "one", "twenty-one", "thirty-one", "forty-one". Maybe it should be "one-teen". Better yet, call it "onety-one".
Good: forty (except for the spelling), sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety
Bad: ten (should be onety), twenty (should be twoty), thirty (should be threety), fifty (should be fivety)
Thirteen should be "onety-three", Fifteen should be "onety-five" (or at least, fiveteen).
Imagine how easy it would be to learn (and teach four year olds) how to count beyond ten if all the numbers followed a consistent pattern.
one, two, three...
onety, onety-one, onety-two, onety-three...
twoty, twoty-one, twoty-two, twoty-three...
threety, threety-one, threety-two, threety-three...
fourty, fourty-one, fourty-two, fourty-three...
fivety, fivety-one, fivety-two, fivety-three...
sixty... Everything from 60 - 99 could stay as-is.
If Fred were around to submit a bug report when the guy who invented numbers was giving them names, we'd have a lot more free time, and a consistently named number system.
I hope you enjoyed my twoty-eighth Communiqué.
Comments
what happens at 100? How about ooonety and a million could be oooooooonety
There's no problem with the current "hundreds" naming system.
You just start over and put the words "one hundred and" before everything.
Then "two hundred and", "three hundred and"... etc... After nine hundred and ninety nine, you move on to thousands, which work fine as-is, until you get to the current, ten-thousand.
In the new number system (NNS) that will be called "Onety Thousand", then "Twoty Thousand" - it all stays consistent.
Conversion news: As an apostle of the NNS I tried "spreading the lore" last night to a group of people. All was going well until "twoty-two", at which point the NNS was widely acknowledged as the ALNS (alternate lifestyle number system).
Point the first, it would make more sense to go nothing, -ty, -hundred, then -ty hundred (not thousand), then hundred hundred then [word for hundred thousands].
Point the second, another problem with English is in the ordinal naming system. "First"? What the heck is that? "Onest"! Similar "fiveth" would be better than "fifth" though obviously, harder to pronounce.
Point the last, "sixths" is really hard to enunciate.
This is the mathematical revolution we've ALL been waiting for!
It would already have been widely adopted if it hadn't been for the nay-sayer conspiracy holding it back. I'm even willing to say that these people are 'ANTI-NUMBER'. Not everyone remembers the sheer horrors of Mathnet, featured prominently on Square One Television.
Japanese works that way. Talk about a fast learn!
Of course, then they have two different counting systems... one for round cylindrical objects and another for everything else.
I heard about this system 30 or 40 years ago, and found it appealing. The comments about it indicated that children taught this method learned more quickly and were able to convert to the conventional notation with ease. The prevailing rap was that kids taught this method could not understand the rest of the world's numbers. This apparently is not the case. But all logic aside, change is resisted. RE: metric. I tried this with one of my kids, but met a lot of distaff resistance. English is very inconsistent, but we manage despite that.
There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary; and those who don't.
Read something more recent.
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Teach your daughter binary, that'll keep things consistant.