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Let's Make a Language: Day 14, Numbers, Numbers, Numbers

Happy Valentines day! Today is a super quick one, we're working on numbers some more.

Nouns in Munya appear in their singular form when co-occuring with number, so instead of English's "one apple, two apples, three apples..." a Munya speaker would say "one apple, two apple, three apple..."

Pa ba, nai ba, tsa ba...

Now, what if a Munya speaker wanted to say "the first apple, the second apple, the third apple..."? They would use the superlative suffix -dyi to create a series of ordinal numbers.

Padyi ba, naidyi ba, tsadyi ba... 

I also want a way to make adverbial numbers like English's "once, twice, thrice...". I decided that a Munya speaker would simply have to put the number into the genitive case to create this distinction.

Pa fa, nai fa, tsa fa...

Right now a Munya speaker has no way to count above ten, so let's create some compound numbers. All numbers from 11 to 19 will follow the same pattern of "10 by x", for example:

Lyei tyi pa.
Ten by one - eleven.

Lyei tyi nai.
Ten by two - twelve.

All multiples of 10 from 20 to 90 will follow a different pattern, "x ten", for example:

Nailei
Two ten- twenty.

Tsalei
Three ten- thirty.

Numbers between multiples of ten will follow the same pattern as numbers from 11 to 19, but with their multiple of ten instead.

Nailyei tyi pa.
Twenty by one - twenty one.

Tsalyei tyi ke.
Thirty by five - thirty five.

And then for good measure, lets create a word for "one hundred": Gem. So now Munya speakers can say numbers to 100 and beyond!

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