Talk:Lojban/Numbers

Untitled
I apologise if I'm out of place here, but I heard about this language being not only logical, but also hexadecimal-happy. Instead, I find neither.

Where is the ease of numbers as in English?

We don't talk about the number two-three, rather twen ty -three. We say four ty -five, not four-five. Can you imagine trying to do a math problem by adding three-five and six-two instead of thirty-five and sixty-two? It only gets worse if you have larger numbers.

Think about trying to add three-four-seven to two-five-six. Wouldn't it be easier to add three-hundred-fourty-seven and two-hundred-fifty-six?

Numbers aren't just digits mushed together. They represent concepts, yet the concept of TEN (or sixteen, if we are going to use hexadecimal) just isn't obvious. There is no assumed base in any of these strings of numbers.

And if this is supposed to be a logical language, why are the last six digit names so much different than the first ones? Aim to INCLUDE hex numbers, not just add them on.

I look forward to your response,

WesT

Separating by 1000s is not culturally neutral
I find it interesting that despite Lojban's apparent goal in being culturally neutral, it has adopted a very Eurocentric approach of separating numbers in groups of 1,000. In China and Japan (and maybe other places, those two are just conveniently at the top of my mind), the number system uses groupings of 10,000 (I guess it would be better to write it as 1,0000?) So someone from there trying to learn the numeric system would have all the same difficulty they would have in learning it for English. 220.239.175.110 (discuss) 12:00, 25 September 2011 (UTC)