The First Day

Day One opens - but which day is it?

Does your alarm clock alarm shrill and scream at you to fall out of bed and start the working day?

Or is it a day off, a holiday?
in which first case you wake up, maybe glance at the clock,
and roll over unless you're going to get up straightaway

And now you're in a new world,

a world where numbers may look familiar,

but are rather different.

Is that the alarm clock?

 Rub your eyes

and look again

The clock face looks similar, but not all the digits are familiar. The old clock tells us it's ten minutes past ten; and the new one? The new one is not working in minutes - sixtieths of the hour - but dozenal divisions of the hour. We need to know these new divisions - and we need the words to name them.
There have been many suggestions for the words we need for our new numbering system - not just in English, either; I am going to suggest some just so that we can begin to talk in dozenal; they won't please everyone, but then, they're not meant to be taken as the only possible set nor as being as immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians! To start with I shall keep "ten" and "eleven" and add "zen" for the dozen.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, onezen (10);
onezen-one, onezen-two, onezen-three .... onezen-eleven, twozen (20);
and then threezen (30), fourzen, fivezen, sixzen, sevenzen, eightzen, ninezen, tenzen, elevenzen and (gross).

Yes, some of these sound quite awful, and need to be turned into proper English by knocking off the corners and rubbing them down with emery paper; so let's suggest "semzen" for 70, "levzen" for E0? But they'll do for the moment so we can demonstrate our ideas. (Any suggestions for names, especially "gross"? Check out those made by some of our readers on site - no two the same ... some at suggestions).

So what time is it by our clock?
For the moment let's divide the hour into twelve "primes" and the "prime" into twelve "minits". We can say that the time on the clockface is "twozen minits past ten", or as "ten point two hours" or as "ten hours twozen". (The minit is divided further into *100 tim, one gross tim.)

More to come ...
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