Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Dwarven Numeracy


So, I'm working on a language for the dwarves in my campaign setting. One of the most important things to my dwarves is the dimension, quantity, or value of a thing. They are architects, engineers, and merchants. As such, having a highly efficient numeric system seemed key to their culture.

I created a synthetic structure which allows a numeric value to be encoded in a series of phonemes. In essence, each number has a name, and that name is a phonetic code representing its value.

To test it out, I made a program which would output every value from 1 to 1 million in dwarven. The result is the largest PDF file on my computer. Take a look if you like; only the first few pages should be good enough to get the idea. The first page explains the encoding. I checked for duplicates too, there are none. Every number has its own name.

Here's the PDF.

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