On 4/27/2012 10:45 AM, Richard Wordingham wrote:
If they are to be adopted by the CLDR, the digits need to be coded consecutively.
I doubt this matters in any case, because this proposed use is for a vigesimal system, which has digits 0..19, not digits 0..9. Trying to treat the first 10 digits as decimal digits in CLDR could accomplish nothing, IMO. Furthermore, what Inuit has is a vigesimal *counting* system, as the article indicates. But this innovated set of numerals, is attempting to turn this into a full-blown radix-20 numerical system, which I doubt has any cultural validity. The Inuit number system is another case of the rather widespread use of mixed 5/20 counting systems, which count 4 "hands" of 5 into groups of 20. Recognition of the "hands" as sub-bases is the reason for the graphological construction of the numbers seen in the Kaktovik Inupiaq students' system. And even if the hurdle of usage is surmounted, so that a character encoding would be appropriate, I don't think combining diacritics makes sense in this case. Rather, this kind of construction is better handled by taking the graphic elements for 5, 10, and 15, and ligating them in a font for the combined units. So the only elements requiring encoding would be 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15, in order to fully represent this system. --Ken
However, the symbols for '5', '10' and '15' do invite interpretation as combining diacritics. Decompositions would have to be encoded from the very beginning - they cannot be added in a later standard.
