Talk:Tonal system
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Untitled[edit]
I'd like to understand the WHY aspect of Tonal system. WHo uses it today, for what, and why? What are the practical applications or has this system by and large been discarded for something better, if so, what were its weaknesses. Thanks.
- It's functionally the same as the base-16 hex used for a great many purposes in IT. It provides a compact way to represent binary data that isn't metaphoric. For example, the color "blue". "Blue" is a word, not a number or a color, and not even a specific shade of a color, but the average Joe knows what "blue" means, whatever his opinion of what particular shade consitutes "blue" may be. Computers don't have opinions (yet), "blue" has to mean something precise for a machine. In some simple and old-fashioned programming languages, it is still possible or even required to specify something like "#0000FF". Note the 6 digits after the "#": two for each component color (RGB); in base-16 00 (=0) means "none", and FF (=255) means "full". This gives us 16777215 different colors (aka, every possible combination of 0-255:0-255:0-255).
- "#0000FF" in binary is 11111111 and in base-ten it's 255. Notice how it's difficult to associate "255" with "blue", but "11111111" has some similarity with "FF". In fact, each digit of a base-16 number represents four ones or zeros in a binary number and "F" represents "1111". Base-16 can represent binary numbers in a way that is human readable (with some practice). I believe Nystrom had realized that most anything countable can be counted more precisely in a binary system (time, etc). It's a shame his ideas were not more popular, as being able to count in base-16 makes understanding technology (that didn't even exist in his time) easier.126.209.154.222 (talk) 17:27, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
Interestingly, base-10 numbers are read the same way in Japanese as base-16 Tonal numbers (different sounds, same system):
| Base 16 Number | Tonal Name | Japanese (Base 10) Name |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | ton | ju |
| 100 | san | hyaku |
| 1000 | mill | sen |
| 1,0000 | bong | man |
| 10,0000 | tonbong | ju-man |
| 100,0000 | sanbong | hyaku-man |
| 1000,0000 | millbong | sen-man |
| 1,0000,0000 | tam | oku |
This makes the translation of numbers between Japanese and other languages extremely problematic, as it isn't a matter of simply changing the vocabulary but reading numbers in an entirely different system. I'm very curious of the historical context by which Japanese ened up with a numeric system that shares the properties of base-10 and base-16.126.209.154.222 (talk) 17:27, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
- See Japanese numerals. The 4-grouping is due to borrowing from Chinese. Double sharp (talk) 02:09, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
This is just a copy of hex but with anti-improvements, mumbo jumbo and grandiose delusions[edit]
Either merge into hexadecimal, or not notable enough. Nobody ever benefited from this system, it's just a hexadecimal but worst, just hex with new meaningless jumbo mumbo words for each number. In Wikipedia we are generous and let people hace their articles, but this is better to be part of hexadecimal article, or just get deleted.Santropedro (talk) 02:43, 7 December 2019 (UTC)