I am going to guess base 10 is prevalent because we have 10 fingers ? :)
I speak a language (Mende) that has no formal mathematics but counting is done in base 10; there are 10 individual words for 1 to 10 , the word for one is "yaella", the word for 10 is "poo", the word (really expression) for 11 is "poo mahun yaella", which literally translates to 10 on top of 1 ie 10+1...I can only think they stopped at 10 words because there are ten fingers to do elementary arithmetic?? granted there are other words for high magnitudes...there are apparently other languages with other bases besides 10 so who knows...possibly due to using other cultural artifacts to serve as digits.
> I am going to guess base 10 is prevalent because we have 10 fingers ? :)
Yeah, basically. There are other ways to count on your hands though. I seem to recall there are places that count on their hands using the 12 finger joints (or segments), and it works just as well.
Edit: To clarify, they use their thumb to point to the joints or segments on each of their fingers, in turn.
interesting :)...if you use all the bone segments in the fingers you can also get base 14 or 28, there is probably a culture out there doing just that.
I speak a language (Mende) that has no formal mathematics but counting is done in base 10; there are 10 individual words for 1 to 10 , the word for one is "yaella", the word for 10 is "poo", the word (really expression) for 11 is "poo mahun yaella", which literally translates to 10 on top of 1 ie 10+1...I can only think they stopped at 10 words because there are ten fingers to do elementary arithmetic?? granted there are other words for high magnitudes...there are apparently other languages with other bases besides 10 so who knows...possibly due to using other cultural artifacts to serve as digits.