#saturnsquared

alt versions

Alrighty, so. Arabic Numerals and its sisters originate from the Brahmi Numerals used in.... India, out of all places, why are they called Arabic and not Indian or Hinduic..... whatever, they were written somewhere within the Indian subcontinent, and they looked like this:

Pretty,,, pretty,,, cool. It is from this symbols that we get our numbers, but also the Arabian Numbers (also called Eastern Arabic Numerals; ours are Western Arabic Numerals), Sanskrit, and a bunch of others.

So for the task of making two brand-new glyphs out of thin air while also making sort of sense, we need two new Brahmi Numerals, to which then we'll evolve into modern times (in this "alternate universe"). Luckily... Brahmi apparently has a numeral for 10, so great, and for 11 i had to make one up; the reason it looks like that it's because i sort of imagined an opened hand to signify that most of the digits on one's hand were used except one.... It kind of made sense at the time, so lets stick to it we don't really have any other option other than pulling stuff out of thin air.

Now comes the boring part; sadly there's not much to say about where these two will go up until when the West Arabic Numerals in (i think) the 11th Century get passed onto Europe via trading. So bear with me:

They make it into Hindu like this:

And into West Arabic like that:

and TAADAA, NOW we are somewhere slightly more interesting, like i said: this is where these numerals get passed onto Europe via trading alongside the other West Arabic Numerals, which sort of look like what they look like today except 4 and 5 for some reason; look it up. They remain there and evolve up until the 15th Century were they finally look like they are today and creating the modern (Western) Arabic Numerals, of which in this universe our 2 new digits are a part of:

They get standardized by the printing press and survive to Modern Day, this definetly could've been presented a better way, but there's not much to say after all is there? Nevertheless they're not so bad, But something that hasn't been addressed yet is how would they be called or spoken aloud.

This was... very fucking hard to figure out but i did manage to come up with something "NaTuRaL" and "rEaLisTiC"... i am not got at word building at all.

So what i did was mash up some PIE roots, make them go through the necessary sound changes to get to Modern English (BY HAND... my hand hurts a little bit :( ) and try to create a system like the one used today in out, sadly, five-fingered hands universe.

And the words i managed to come up for the two new digits are:

A - Ten

B - Sentine

(A = 10, B = 11)

Note that i used A and B, and thats because this would be a Base-12 system, Pretty neat.

For the rest of the numbers, it goes something like this:

10 (12) - Widease

11 (13) - Idgea

12 (14) - Twetsea

13 (15) - Thirdgea

14 (16) - Fourdgea

15 (17) - Fivdgea

16 (18) - Sixdgea

17 (19) - Sevendgea

18 (20) - Eighdgea

19 (21) - Ninedgea

1A (22) - Tendgea

1B (23) - Sendgea

Basically, add a -dgea to every number. same thing happens with multiples of 10 (12): other than instead of -dgea its -wid, like how we have -teen and -ty:

20 - Twixtwid

30 - Thirwid

40 - Fourwid

50 - Fifwid

60 - Sixwid

70 - Sevenwid

80 - Eighdwid

90 - Ninewid

A0 - Tenwid

B0 - Sentwid

And for numbers like 21... literally the same as how we do it now, its Twixtwid-one... 100 is still "Hundred", 1,000 is still "Thousand", 10,000 is "Widease Thousand", 100,000 "Hundred Thousand", 1,000,000 "Million" and so forth infinitely.