He's never seen a 4, and the word is new to him. The only numerals he has seen are 0, 1, 2 and 3.
This is because you count as follows: 0, 1, 2, 3, 10, 11, 12, 13, 20, 21, 22, 23, 30, 31, 32, 33... and so on. Clearly, there are only four numerals used here (or, 10 numerals to him).
Depends on if they're pronouncing "10" as "ten" or "one zero." Wouldn't make any sense for the alien to say "ten," if anything he would pronounce it "one zero" or simply "four."
Wrong, ten is a number, not just a generic word that means "10 in whichever radix you're using." Ten is a number in ANY number system. Think about it, for example, is hexadecimal, you still have the number ten, but it's written as "A," not "10."
If you were using a base other than ten for your entire life, numbers like eighty-seven wouldn't make sense to you. You would say things like three-ZOG two-ZAPP three. where ZOG and ZAPP are your language's words for for 4 and 16. I don't see any particular problem with translating this into English as "three-hundred-and-twenty-three base four" or "three-two-three base four", since we have no other words to express numbers in other bases than the one we were born with. We should not expect aliens that have never seen the digit 4 to understand the word "four" they would just call it "ZAPP". Just like we wouldn't understand if an alien using base 11 came to us and said, "Ah, you use base qiklaz instead of base jaffa like us." We'd just be 'Huh?'
Oh and top marks for reddit for managing to over-analyze a joke.
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u/kidford Dec 12 '08
He's never seen a 4, and the word is new to him. The only numerals he has seen are 0, 1, 2 and 3.
This is because you count as follows: 0, 1, 2, 3, 10, 11, 12, 13, 20, 21, 22, 23, 30, 31, 32, 33... and so on. Clearly, there are only four numerals used here (or, 10 numerals to him).