I wanted to answer more questions this round but I ran out of steam. :')
Next update, Chapter 8 begins.
Transcript
Septemberdale asked: Idrisah, how, if at all, do Avians count on their hands? I heard it's pretty similar to binary.
Idrisah: Avians use lots of different body-counting methods.The two most common in Tiiliitian culture are knuckle counting and ternary. Knuckle counting is pretty much the same as it is for humans— counting the bones of each finger. Avians do this by pointing to each finger bone with the opposite finger. Ternary finger counting goes up to 8 on one hand (the typical number base for avians) but doesn't use binary, as the name implies. Instead of two digit morphemes there are three: lowered, raised, and crooked. Which means, essentially, this system uses base 3 to count in base 8 on a hand with two digits. Isn't that delightful?
24 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 36”
eden
honestly I can’t even imagine doing anything, let alone crafting complex space flight mechanisms with just two fingers. don’t know how avians managed. but hey! this story is about different people and cultures interacting lol
Synthaphone
I believe they use their beaks/tongues to manipulate objects in addition to their fingers, which probably helps!
Vinemaple
I do want to ask Jay, sometime, about that finger-wrapping thing avians seem to do… looks potentially really involved and clever
The Opossum Witch
Please take care of yourself!! I’d honestly rather you rest for as long as you need and take time for yourself!
leecetheartist
It is really really delightful and elegant too!
EnchantresEmily
“Isn’t that delightful?”
Idrisah, you are such a nerd (affectionate).
Vinemaple
Take care of yourself, Jay! If you have to take a breather, we can always LOOK AT THE AWESOME RECOMMENDATIONS IN THE AD SPACE ON THIS PAGE, HINT HINT!
oh6
Whoa, never thought of knuckle-counting before – actually easier to manage in some ways since the finger can be braced against the knuckle bone. I once read about a hand counting system that went up to 90 or so, and wondered how that was done, and this may explain it!
TamLin
Humans actually have 19 total knuckles on each hand, counting fingertips, but 5×19 is 95! So you can keep track of repetitions on one hand and count on the other up to 95 with great ease! My dad taught me that for ease of reciting something 95 times, and I still don’t do that as much as I should lol
forthebit
How do you get up to 5x? 19 on each hand and then both hands together I can get, but that’s still only 4x, isn’t it?
forthebit
Nm, after posting I reread and caught the part about “keeping track of repetitions” with one hand, so it’s one repetition per finger, hence 5x.
I guess if you used knuckles to count repetitions as well, you could get up to 19×19, or 361. That’s almost enough to count out a whole year!
Vinemaple
This is why we have so much fossilized base-12 in Western and Middle Eastern cultures, they say… the ancient Babylonians are believed to have knuckle-counted to 12 on one hand, with the thumb touching a phalange.
creetur
This ask makes me wonder how the other sophonts count.. what documented system does the bug ferrets have? (or multiple systems, knowing how complicated they can get)
JoB
Let me tell you about the cultural exchange that happened after the First Contact between the BFGC and the Danes …
Lilac
Chapter 8 soon Yay!!! This has been nice though, I think many stories can be elevated with some time spent alone with just the characters, “filler” if you will (not filler!!) This was a fun break!!
Teod
You almost doubled the previous record of Q&A pages and you say you wanted to do more? I enjoy the worldbuilding a lot, but a long period of no plot progression is getting me impatient.
Jay Eaton
I wanted to do more per update, the length of the update pause was never going to change. It was this or another hiatus because I’m catching up to my backlog faster than I predicted. This summer was rough for my productivity
horse
If you’re that impatient, the patreon is right there? Otherwise, you’re reading a free webcomic and getting detailed worldbuilding Q&A pages on every update day in the midst of a planned hiatus. That’s honestly above and beyond for a webcomic creator, you don’t have grounds to complain here.
eden
it’s kind of rude and entitled to be riding the artist like that… this isn’t ai dude, you can’t just snap your fingers for an instant fix, jay has a life you know
Plasmatic Shrimp
Honestly I expected you to run out of steam sooner. Doing this much art within a month is no joke!
I think aside from Schoolhouse Rock, this was my first introduction to base systems other than base 10. It’s interesting to see how little details like these impact the worldbuilding!
Entguarde
idrisah i love you NEVER stop being a linguistic nerd!
and sorry if this is a stupid question, but what does she mean when she says using base three to count in base eight? i’m not too familiar with numerical systems like these
JoB
The latter finger-counting system is using two fingers, each in three possible positions, which makes for nine different positions of the whole hand.
Eight of these positions are “legal”, and correspond to the eight figures their culture “really” uses (in writing, I suppose).
[The “illegal” one is “00”, i.e., an avian “fist”. I wonder whether that’s the point of ruling that one out …]
So, they have common base 8 numbers and the users of this finger-counting system represent it with “base 3” positions of individual fingers – just like a (relative?) majority of humans write base 10 numbers but do finger counting with two positions for each finger.
[quickly draws a curtain to distract from details like “but isn’t that human finger-counting method unary, rather than ‘base 2’ = binary” or “but figures go from 0 to n-1, rather than from 1 to n“]
7arty
>I wonder whether that’s the point of ruling that one out
I don’t know, avian fingers don’t seem to be a particularly good fit for punching (unlike us claw-less apes).
Septemberdale
Maybe the unused one simply means zero.