Cenyani grammar reference

Numbers in Cenyani are actually extremely regular, in that they follow the same predictable patterns consistently throughout the language, which of course makes Cenyani numbers rather easy to learn. This is, however, complicated by the fact that Cenyani numbers are all in base 8.

I will not go into any detail at all on this page describing what a number base is or how a positional numeral system and base 8 work. While intimate knowledge in these subjects may not be entirely necessary to comprehend the language aspect of this article, it will undoubtedly help.

All numbers below are in base 8, unless marked with a subscript d (which stands for decimal, i.e. base 10). Hence, the number 10 is the octal number for decimal 8_d; and decimal 6945_d represents octal 15,441.

The entire Cenyani number system depends on the following base numbers:

Be careful not to confuse no with English “no”!

The numbers 2–7 can be prefixed to ogi, tal and octi to form multiples of each respective number, though note that anni is always prefixed as any- with a consonantal y. Furthermore, some numbers make tal change slightly when prefixed to it – this pattern is important and will later be referred to as the tal-pattern.

These basic numbers can all be combined into more complex numbers – in fact, with these numbers, any integer between 0 and 7777 (4095_d) can be expressed. To do this, the numbers are simply put next to each other with the most significant number first. However, numbers which end in -ogi (except for ogi itself) have the -gi part dropped if they are directly followed by any one of the numbers 1–7, which in turn is suffixed to the remaining -o. For example, the number 52 (42_d) is spoken as secovar = secogi (50) + var (2).

To create even bigger numbers, the word tal can be suffixed with any multiple of two – let’s call that number n – to represent the number 100ⁿ. If the multiple of n in spoken form begins with a consonant, the l of tal is dropped. This so-called tal-form follows the previously established tal-pattern when a single number 2–7 is attached to the front of the tal-form. This means the Cenyani number system can actually be expanded infinitely. Because of this, I will only list a few of the smaller combinations:

And so on.

Numbers larger than 7777 have to be grouped into multiples of 1,0000. Allow me to attempt to clarify. Consider for example how we in English group numbers into multiples of 1,000_d: we say “two-hundred and fifty-nine million sixty-two thousand” = 259,062,000_d, which represents (259×10⁶ + 62×10³)_d, instead of something much more cumbersome like “two hectomillion five decamillion nine million six decathousand two thousand”, which would be (2×10⁸ + 5×10⁷ + 9×10⁶ + 6×10⁴ + 2×10³)_d.

As mentioned just above, Cenyani behaves in a similar manner, but in groups of 1,0000. The number 5,4235,7100 would be read as sectalaš lašocti vartal cimmosec tavar anyocti tal, where the words represent the following numbers:

(sec) × talaš + (laš×octi + var×tal + cimme×ogi + sec) × tavar + (anni×octi + tal) =
= (5) × 1000² + (4×1000 + 2×100 + 3×10 + 5) × 1000¹ + (7×1000 + 1×100) =
= 5×1000² + 4235×1000¹ + 7100 =
= 5,4235,7100 = 92,921,408_d

Scriptwise helper

Mainly for fun (and to see whether I could pull it off), I wrote a little script to convert base 8 and 10 numbers to their spoken Cenyani form. Note that only integers are supported. If you can’t figure out how to operate this little tool... well, that’s a shame.

You are welcome to separate groups of digits with commas, but don’t put any other non-digit characters in the number.

Input: | Base: octal / decimal |

Result: nothing to display.