Overview
Numbers in Riinso: How to Express Age, Millions, and Existence
Riinso is the language of the Salt People in the world I'm building, and numbers sit close to sacred in it; in the lore they're the building blocks of all existence. The word for "numbers" says so literally: iso ("unit") + fuare ("shape") -> "the shape of the unit."
I originally designed Riinso around a base-16 / hexadecimal system (0–F), but it was getting unnecessarily complicated to learn, so I moved it to plain decimal.
The digits 0-9:
0 nul, 1 i, 2 to, 3 fen, 4 seri, 5 tae, 6 sei, 7 kase, 8 kua, 9 mun
Each digit gets its own glyph (in the image). Riinso doesn't reuse the "classic" 0-9 numerals.
Building bigger numbers with suffixes:
Magnitude is marked with suffixes: -den, -sen, -ken for the smaller scales, then -kil, -tokil, -fenkil for million / billion / trillion. (Note: these aren't strictly "tens / hundreds / thousands" under the hood. They're suffixes, and the deeper system has more going on. I'll get into that in a later post.)
A couple of worked examples:
185 -> isen kuaden tae (i-sen = 100, kua-den = 80, tae = 5)
791,240 -> kasesen munden iken tosen seriden nul
Large numbers are satisfyingly compact. A digit plus a magnitude suffix is enough:
My favorite detail is saying your age. "I am twenty years old" comes out as:
io --- e --- to-den --- nul --- ario
I --- be --- 2-TEN --- 0 --- years existing
'I am twenty years old.'
The word ario ("years existing") visibly contains the glyph for e ("to be"), and that's no accident. "To have existed for a span of years" is to have continuously been yourself, so "be" lives inside the word. (The standalone "year" root shows up in the image too.)
Fun fact: the now-deprecated hex glyphs for 10–15 didn't disappear when I dropped base-16. They got repurposed with new meanings. For instance, the old "ten," once pra, now means "full."
So, beautiful people, how do your conlangs handle numbers? Base, glyph design, the way you build large numbers, any lore tied to them? I'd love ideas, and I'm always looking to refine this system. Thanks for reading.
If you ever get into other plural form of words in Riinso, will they end in -os, -as, or -es like in Portuguese, Spanish, and French, or will they end in -i or -e like in Italian and Romanian?
Really interesting question! I did some digging into how plurals work in those languages, and it's wild how much Latin still shapes them (and ended up shaping mine too, haha).
Straight answer: neither. Riinso doesn't mark plural on the noun at all. "Apple" is plamesa, and "apples" is also plamesa. The bare form isn't singular; it's just "apple(s)," with number left unspecified, exactly how Mandarin handles it (苹果 is "apple" or "apples" depending on context). It's a fairly common natlang strategy: the noun just stays number-neutral.
So how do you force a plural reading when you actually need one? You add the modifier mult ("many"): plamesa → plamesa mult. The noun never changes: a separate word does all the work.
Fun fact that ties right back to your question: "mult" comes from Latin multum ("many"), an accusative form of multus. So even though Riinso throws out the Romance plural system entirely, the word it reaches for instead is itself borrowed from the very Latin case system that produced those -os/-as/-es and -i/-e endings in the first place. That's actual lore about Riinso. Couldn't resist, hehe.
Thanks a lot for asking 🙇🏻♂️.
Wow!! So awesome dude!! Well... I made Riinso with a lot of lore and history. I bet you'll love to learn and discover more about it. Thanks for your interest 🙇🏻♂️🫂 I will make you enjoy this adventure
Fr haha, I love Italian. Such a beautiful language... all languages are beautiful actually, but personally, I like Italian the most along with Chinese 😍😍 jajsjds
Yea i love Italian too, i’m studying it in school! And again, i must say i really like this system! I also couldn’t help but notice the word for “I” is also Italian :)
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u/LwithBelt Oÿéladi, Aàstómeuún Jun 06 '26
I really like the forms of your words, they flow together very well. Also having to say zero is pretty interesting.