Numbers

Taught on the front page rather than in a lesson, because there is nothing to teach — twelve words and no exception. Lesson 05 is where they are first used and now says where they came from. That arrangement is why six, eight and nine sat in no sentence in the whole course until Lesson 21 and Lesson 24 were given sentences for them.

Digits

Units above ten

Twelve, not eleven. This page opened with eleven words and no exception until September 5, 2026, and so did Lesson 05; the front page said eleven number words reach a thousand, which eleven of them cannot — mila is the twelfth and it is the one that reaches it. Eleven was right until mila was settled, and the sentence that carried it was never the sentence that changed. The dictionary still says eleven and is still correct: it is counting the words that reach a hundred, and that ceiling did not move. One number, two ceilings, and only the pages that named the higher one were wrong — which is why finding it took reading all four rather than grepping for the figure. check.py counts both from the glosses now.

Building numbers

There are no irregular numbers. Larger numbers are built from des, sen and mila by two positions, and the position is what carries the arithmetic:

• A digit before a base multiplies it. du-des is twenty, tri-sen is three hundred.
• A digit after a base adds to it. des-uan is eleven, du-des-uan is twenty-one.

So du-des and des-du are different numbers — twenty and twelve — and the only thing telling them apart is which side of des the du stands on. A multiplier of one is never written: uan-des would be a second spelling of des, and there are no second spellings here.

This page used to say “largest unit first”, which contradicts its own table: du-des puts the smaller unit first, because two is multiplying ten rather than being added to it. Corrected September 3, 2026, when check.py was taught to parse these forms and the rule it needed turned out not to be the rule that was written down.

Teens — des followed by the digit:

Tens — the digit followed by des:

Tens plus a digit — join with a hyphen:

• 21 = du-des-uan
• 45 = pat-des fai

Hundreds — the digit followed by sen, then the remainder as a separate word:

• 345 = tri-sen pat-des fai

Open questions

• A number cannot count a pronoun. The three of us has no form. Numbers go before what they count — tri anak — and a pronoun takes neither that shape nor the reverse: tri kita is not a construction, and kita tri would read as possession if it read as anything. Found on September 5, 2026 in text 19, which had written Kita tri sini since the day it was written and had it read back as “the three of us are here” by everyone including its own line-by-line table. The line is Kita sini now. The invention was a shape, not a word, which is why nothing caught it: every check the repository had was looking for words that do not exist, and every word in that sentence exists.

• Ordinal numbers have no form. First, second, eighth cannot be built. Text 6 is the clearest case: a story that runs on days — ill seven days, medicine eight days — wanted on the eighth day and could only say for eight days. Nothing in the cardinal system suggests a derivation, and inventing one would be the first affix in the language. Listed in the index since it was first noticed and recorded here, where the decision would live, on September 3, 2026.

  It blocks more than a sentence. The language has no name for any weekday and none for any month — two closed sets missing entire. A language built on economy would number them rather than name them, as Chinese does with week-one for Monday, and that would cost no roots at all. It cannot, because numbering the second day is naming an ordinal. Measured with the other closed sets on September 4, 2026: seven weekday names and twelve month names is nineteen roots that numbering would make unnecessary, which no other open question on the list can say. The briefing is written.

• Words for 1000 — settled: mila. Above a thousand is still open.

• Whether the separator between groups is a hyphen or a space is used inconsistently above (du-des-uan vs pat-des fai, both inherited from the README) and needs a single rule.