← Back to Topics

Numbers

Pikotika writes numbers in the digits you already use, so there is nothing to learn about writing them. All you learn is how to say them — ten digit words, four words for the powers of ten, and one pattern with no exceptions in it.

Say any number

The ten digits

Every digit from two to nine ends in a -ts, -ks, or -ns, so a run of them is easy to hear apart from the words around it.

• 0 nem 无
• 1 wun 一
• 2 pits
• 3 tets
• 4 wats
• 5 kins
• 6 siks
• 7 sens
• 8 ots
• 9 noks

And four more words

• 10 tekas 十
• 100 katon 百
• 1000 kiru 千
• 1000000 miron 兆

That is the whole vocabulary. Fourteen words say every number there is.

Japanese and Korean readers: 兆 here is a million, 10⁶, not 10¹². Pikotika groups by thousands, the way the metric prefixes do, so 兆 lines up with mega-.

Putting them together

Count the hundreds, then say katon. Count the tens, then say tekas.There are no special words for eleven through nineteen, nor for twenty, thirty, forty: twenty is simply two tens.

Notice 100 and 11: you leave the wun off in front of a power of ten. One hundred is just katon; saying wun katon is not wrong, but it's longer than it needs to be.

Past a thousand nothing changes except that the groups get a comma, which is a pause when you say it aloud:

Write no thousands separators. Half the world puts a comma where the other half puts a period, so Pikotika writes 12345 and leaves the gap out. The period is always the decimal point.

Parts of a number

Four small extensions, each one word.

A fraction is written with a slash, just as in English: 3/4. To read out loud, just read the slash as in. Note that in is doing nothing special here — it is the ordinary preposition, and three in four is what 3/4 means.

Ordinals are the one number written in letters, because each is a single compound word. Every one you are likely to want is a standing word — wunorten, pitsorten, tetsorten and so on up through tekasorten, plus katonorten, kiruorten and mironorten — and they keep working inside a larger number, since only the last word takes the suffix: 21st is pits tekas wunorten.

Counting things

A number is an ordinary modifier, so it goes straight in front of what it counts. Nothing agrees with it, and there is no plural to remember.

You may write the number as a digit or as its word — 2 nemyan and pits nemyan are the same two nights, said the same way. Digits are the usual choice, and the only choice once the number is long.

For an amount you are not counting exactly, three ordinary words do the work: nem no, mur many, and pan all. To ask, use ker mesur — what amount — or, for a price, ker moni.

Numbers in the wild

Clock times, dates, and years all reuse exactly these words with one more word standing in for the punctuation — ora for the colon, and anyo, mese and yan for a year, a month and a day. Those get their own pages, under Telling time and Dates and weekdays.

← Back to Topics