Savez-vous compter en na'vi ?

Pour celles et ceux qui ont vu le film Avatar, voici quelques précisions sur la base octale (8):

The octal numeral system

To understand the octal numeral system, let’s start with a more familiar system: the decimal system. In the decimal system (or base 10), we have ten digits, from zero to nine. When we add 1 (one) to 9 (nine), we get 10 (ten), or the unit 1 (one) followed by 0 (zero). This system is positional (the digits represent the units, and their rank the matching power of ten). Thus, 132 decomposes into 100 + 30 + 2 = 1*10² + 3 *10¹ + 2 *10⁰. This system is also known as a positional decimal numeral system.
Base-8 uses digits from 0 to 7. Its first ten is eight in decimal (8₁₀ = 108), the base is noted in subscript. The decomposition of an octal number (in a positional system) is the same as the one of a decimal number, only the base changes: (132)8 = 1*8² + 3*8¹ + 2*8⁰. If we carry it out, we get the matching decimal number, here 90.

Na’vi numbering rules

• Data about Na’vi numbering are still very scarce up to now. But we do know that their numeral system is octal, or in the base-8, which can be explained by the fact Na’vi have four fingers.
• The few known numbers are: ’aw [1], mune [2], tsìng [4], kinä [7], vofu [16], and tsìvol [32].
• Syntactically, it seems that thirty-two (tsìvol) could derive from the root of four (tsì) and would mean 4 times 8, assuming that vo would be the root for eight.