Q: how do I talk about large numbers?

The funny thing about large numbers is you need them less often than you think.

There’s a large, meaningful difference between ‘A tiger is about to jump us!’ and ‘Two tigers are about to jump us!’. Maybe you can fight off one tiger, but it’s hopeless with two.

But compare ‘77 tigers are about to jump us!’ and ‘78 tigers are about to jump us!’ — does it matter? Your decisions and your fate will be much the same. So most of the time, we only really need three number words: 󱥳 wan, 󱥮 tu, 󱤼 mute.

When dealing with small sums of money, more precision might actually make a difference. Maybe you can afford something that costs $77, but if it costs $78 you’re one dollar short. For numbers below or around a hundred, we use words 󱥳 wan, 󱥮 tu, 󱤭 luka, 󱤼 mute, 󱤄 ale, as if they were coins worth 1, 2, 5, 20, and 100:

But above 100, this system quickly becomes annoying:

In 2021, jan Kapilu and jan Tepo came up with an expanded and backward-compatible system to talk about large numbers: instead of adding 100, 󱤄 ale multiplies the previous number by 100.

This is useful for years in the Gregorian calendar, and especially convenient for the current millenium:

Protip: you can imagine splitting numbers into two digit pairs: 2025 -> 20,25, 123456789 -> 1,23,45,67,89, translating each number like 23 and 67, and joining them using 󱤄 ale. “Multiplying by 100” is just the same thing, but explained slightly differently!

When writing in Latin characters, you can also abbreviate large numbers as W, T, L, M, A: