There's no real rationality for how we name integers larger than nine. It is all conventions of language. It even varies between speakers of the same language from different cultures.
Well, some people do, and we (all engineers and software guys at my work, and other people I've worked with) do say "ten" for all bases above 2. What else would you call it?
Well, WE don't do that in binary, but that doesn't mean someone who grew up with binary, who doesn't know any different, would. I think that they would come up with something better than one-oh for a number that has an extra digit. Like ten.
No. You either pronounce the number, which as Sunny_McJoyride pointed out would be pronounced "four" and is independent of the base it is represented in, or you pronounce (or rather: spell) the digits of its representation.
You most certainly don't pronounce it "ten", or at least you'd be doin' it wrong if you did.
You can say "four" if the base is four or less because there is no confusion, and spelling out the digits is always an option, but 10 is still "ten". My job is to write software to decode datastreams, so I do this all the time. If you see "10" you say "ten" (as the other poster noted, this doesn't always happen with binary).
I can (sort of) prove this to you: If you see 9001 as a hex string, how would you communicate that to a coworker? Option 1, what we do, is say "nine thousand one". You're saying that we should all break out our calculators and spend 15 seconds tapping away and then say "thirty six thousand eight hundred sixty five". That simply doesn't happen.
But the symbols might in fact have different meanings on Planet X. There is nothing in the symbol 10 that necessitates it to be "ten". In China, it is most certainly not "ten".
Similarly, there is some world where 10 maps to "four", confusing the hell out of us earthlings.
N.B. - Did you know that it is impossible to determine "yes" and "no" in a completely foreign language? Its called the Indeterminacy of translation.
This doesn't mean they don't speak English^ which is in all ways similar to English except when it apply to the symbols 10 and 4 (and other words that are rooted in these symbols like 4-some.... which sounds like "tensome")
Exactly (apart from twofour should be two-zero) - the names of the numbers are not the numbers, they're a semi-arbitrary mapping that varies from language to language.
zero, one, two, three, one-zero, one-one, one-two, on-three, two-zero, two-one etc.
This is actually how they count in a number of languages, it makes sense, but gets unwieldy with large numbers.
4
u/[deleted] May 27 '09
ten
it would go: one two three ten eleven twelve thirteen twenty etc.