leupagus:

unpretty:

awesome-blossom:

unpretty:

amimijones:

unpretty:

insisting a fictional culture uses a sexagesimal number system is all fun and games until you keep having to invent words because so many things in english are rooted in base-10

What kind of words?

Decimate? Decade?

decade, but also measurements of distance. there is now an elaborate backstory for where they get their measurement systems from, which i will never actually use or share, it will just exist in the ether as a weird fact that only i know

You ever try rooting through language for words derived from real-world location names and proper nouns?  Words you’d logically have to cut out of usage for a fictional setting?  There’s a LOT of them.  More than you’d think.

for the most part i don’t worry about it, because literally everything and anything can be handwaved away as a translation—as long as they’re still referring to a person who gets off on hurting people, the word ‘sadist’ is an acceptable translation to english of whatever word they actually use, and regardless of whether their society has secretaries we can still translate whatever they call that weird-ass bird to secretary bird. hell, most of the time i take the handwaving one step further, like “okay well obviously they don’t have ducks on this weird fantasy planet but this bird is similar enough to a duck that if an english speaking person moved there they would call it a duck” because if a ruffed grouse can be a partridge then why the can’t this fake water bird be a duck. if it’s a lumpy brown starch that grows underground then english speakers are going to call it a potato because that’s just how language works. if i’m going to have a fiction that english speakers can read then it’s going to have to be in english regardless of whatever fictional language they would surely use instead and that makes everything an approximate translation imho. BUT my problem is when they are referring to something totally different, i.e., they don’t refer to a collection of ten years because that number has no real significance, they refer to a collection of twelve instead, so the word ‘decade’ doesn’t work at all. or measurements of distance, which are always totally arbitrary no matter what culture you’re from! the meter is ultimately no less bullshit than the foot. no language in real life has a word for “the length of this fictional person’s forearm, which has for a number of historical and cultural reasons become the standard around which our system of measuring length is based” let alone a word for “sixty of that person’s forearm”. you can’t just say a mile, or a kilometer, or a league, because those are different distances! english speakers who moved to this fake place would not just start calling sixty forearms a mile; they would use whatever word the locals used, and then figure out how to convert one length to the other rather than just adopt their perfectly good system of measurement like reasonable people.

which makes writing about it A HUGE PAIN but anyway

This is an excellent post but also I am DYING to read the backstory and info on the base-sixty counting system.