Numbers & Mathematics

Everything you need to know to form large numbers, express time, and even do some basic math. There's quite a lot you can do with just the basic building blocks that Kokanu provides.

It's simple enough to talk about the base number words up to 100 that Kokanu provides: 

wan - 1 (one)

ha - 2 (two)

san - 3 (three)

nanku - 4 (four)

lima - 5 (five)

lijo - 6 (six)

setan - 7 (seven)

etu - 8 (eight)

saka - 9 (nine)

tiju - 10 (ten)

sijen - 100 (hundred)

But how do you put these words together to form other numbers? IFor numbers up to 999, it's actually very much like you would do it in English! There is no such thing as a modifier form of a number, they all act as connected nouns. Let's look at examples and it will all be clear.

tiju ha - 12 (ten and two)

etu tiju - 80 (eight tens)

san tiju ha - 32 (three tens and two)

lima sijen lijo - 506 (five hundreds and six)

Forming Numbers 1000 and larger

Powers of a thousand (thousand, million, billion, trillion, etc.) are expressed with con followed by the exponent. For example,

con wan - one thousand

con ha - one million

con san - one billion

con nanku - one trillion

It’s important to think of con to mean “thousand to the power of” or “1000x” rather than just “thousand”. The word tan is used after each power of a thousand when adding extra numbers.

nanku tiju san con wan - 43,000 ([four tens and three] thousand to the power of ^one)

nanku tiju san con wan tan wan - 43,001 ([four tens and three] thousand to the power of ^one, then [one])

san con ha, tan nanku sijen nanku tiju lijo con wan, tan setan tiju etu - 3,446,078 ([three] thousand to the power of ^two, then [four hundreds and ten fours and six] thousand to the power of ^one, then [seven tens and eight])

Unlike other words which would be considered modifiers after the first one, no matter how many number words you put together it always counts as a single noun.

Zero

The word nula is used for "zero", though, like in English, it doesn't often appear in compound whole number words. You don't find yourself saying "four thousand, zero hundred, and fifty six", do you? That said, zero is still a very important concept.

Cardinals and Ordinal Numbers

Cardinal numbers are placed before the noun. These are used for counting how many or how much of something there is.

mi le junja in san pawo. - "I have three dogs"

mi le tun tiju etu osa minuli. - "I have been working for eighteen hours

Ordinal numbers are placed after the noun. These are used to specify the position of an item in a series, like "fourth" or "seventeenth".

pawo ha le tope ani. - "The second dog is the best"

san ten putuci je osa tiju etu le conca. - It is 18:03, literally "three minutes after the eighteenth hour have passed"

This is why when telling time, we say san osa to mean "three hours", and "osa san" to mean "three o'clock", literally "third hour".

Fractions, Decimals, and Percents

It's pretty straightforward to talk about whole numbers, but it gets a bit more complicated when you need to discuss numbers with fractional components.

To talk about fractions we use [numerator] osa je [denominator], literally "[numerator] parts of [denominator].

san osa je lima - 3/5

ha tiju nanku osa je ha sijen san tiju wan - 24/231

To talk about decimals we use [whole number] pintu [decimal digits]. Decimal digits are stated one by one using single digit number words.

tiju ha pintu san ha nanku nanku - 12.3244

san pintu wan nanku wan lima saka ha... - 3.141592...

To talk about percentages we add the phrase osa je sijen to the end of the number. This can be combined with decimal notation to specify decimal percentages.

ha tiju lima osa je sijen - 25%

nanku tiju pintu etu setan wan osa je sijen - 40.871%

Negative Numbers

Negative numbers are stated using opotu je [number] meaning "reflection of [number]" or "opposite of [number]", or [number] je for short.

opotu je san - -3

opotu je nanku osa je tiju - -4/10

opotu je lijo pintu saka saka - -6.99

Mathematical Operations

While there are no specific words for mathematical operations such as "addition" or "multiplication", other descriptions can be used to talk about the operations in a mathematical context.