Snat Sajem Tan/Expressing Plurals and Counting

In this lesson, you will learn about grammatical number and counting.

Grammatical number
Grammatical number enables a language to express how many of something exists. In English, we have singular (for only one thing) and plural (for more than two things, usually expressed with an -s on the end of a noun). In Sajem Tan, there are a number of ways to express plurals.

â
The suffix -â is attached to a noun or pronoun to make it plural. This is the most basic way of pluralizing words in Sajem Tan. For example, röfit is "wing", and röfitâ is "wings".

This is the most basic form of plural. Nearly any time there are multiple of an object, it is appropriate to use this suffix. Clearly, however, this section of the lesson isn't done. That's because there are other plural forms. Each is used for more specific use cases.

ââ
The suffix -ââ signifies and infinity of something. So röfitââ is "infinite wings".

You may pronounce a glottal stop or a glottal fricative between each â, or however works for you. There is no official consensus on this.

mon
The suffix -mon signifies a collection or group of things. If kižüt is "bee", then kižütmon is a swarm of bees. If ţefnöm is "bear", then ţefnömmon is a pack of bears.

-mon emphasizes the fact that the noun in question is in a group, implying organization and moderate size, but most importantly that the group acts as a whole rather than as individuals.

This suffix is also applicable if you're just talking about having a collection of something in the standard sense of the word, so if ţefam means "rock" and you collect rocks, you could describe that as a ţefammon.

Sometimes, -mon can even make a new word, for example zmetmon (city) from zmet (building).

no and nâ
The suffixes -no and -nâ express partitives. Partitive quantity is expressed by the words "some" and "any" in English. If you know French, you may be familiar with this concept already (and, if not, this page explains French partitives well).

Sajem Tan -no expresses the singular partitive. In English, this corresponds to phrases such as "some pizza" or "some chocolate"—in Sajem Tan, ţnamökno and rüzimno, respectively. You might also translate it as "some of"—for example, jëkëmno (some of a book).

On the other hand, -nâ expresses the plural partitive. This corresponds to English phrases such as "some books" or "some birds"—jëkëmnâ and viţitnâ in Sajem Tan, respectively.

Combining Plurals
Can we take this even further? Of course we can. Here are an example of pluralizing plurals:


 * chicken (decek) &rarr; groups of chickens (decekmonâ)
 * flower (jidök) &rarr; part of a flower patch (jidökmonno)
 * seed (fmat) &rarr; infinite groups of infinite seeds (fmatââmonââ)

Once, Stone and Fog were messing with this and the result was snymmunmonmunahahmunmonah, which was translated as "groups of hyper-infinite very large groups of hyper-clouds".

Vocabulary

 * decek - chicken
 * jidök - flower
 * fmat - seed
 * viţit - bird
 * ţefnöm - bear
 * röfit - wing
 * kižüt - bee

Exercises
Using the root given and the most appropriate plural suffix, answer each question in a single word.

Counting
Obviously, when counting, we use numbers. In this section of the lesson, you will learn how to say the names of the numbers in Sajem Tan. This is a bit difficult, because we actually use two numeral systems: senary (base-6) and decimal (base-10). We say that senary is the native form, but that we borrowed in the decimal system. We will introduce the decimal system first because it will be more familiar to most English speakers.

Decimal
The following are the numbers zero to ten in decimal, as well as 100 and 1,000:

Senary
The following are the numbers zero to six in senary, as well as 36 and 216:

Using the numbers
It isn't enough to know the lists above; you have to know how to put the numbers together. For example, let's look at the number 27. The digit 2 is in the tens place, and 7 is in the ones place (two tens plus seven ones equals twenty-seven). In English, we call this number "twenty-seven". The word "twenty" shows that the first digit is ten multiplied by two. In Sajem Tan, this number is called famznek žat in decimal (literally "two-ten seven"), or löcxek vyt in senary (literally "four-six three"). As you can see, "Numbers typically begin with the most significant digit compounded to the appropriate multiplier".